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THE VEDDER LECTURES. 1875. 



" T^e I<i^t by wi\i6i\ we stee I<igllt," 



OR 



NATURE AND THE SCRIPTURES. 

A COURSE OF LECTURES 



DELIVERED BEFORE 



e Cijeologiml S^minarD artir Rutgers College, 

NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY. 



BY 

TAYLER LEWIS, LL.D, L.H.D., 

UNION COLLEGE. 



\Ev dpx'r) rjv 6 Aoyog. — John i. i SjS. 

NEW YORK: 
BOARD OF PUBLICATION OF THE R. C. A., 

34 VESE Y STREET. 
1875. 



3L24-0 

.L55" 



Entered according to Act of Congress, iu the year 1875, by 

WILLIAM EEKRIS, Agent, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, "D. C. 



THE 



VEDDER LECTURES 



1875 



PREFACE 



The general title chosen for this little book is regarded 
as, more than any other, suggestive of its pervading 
thought. The study of nature alone is ever revealing 
more mysteries than it solves. At every step the dark- 
ness grows faster than the light. Endless links, endless 
adaptations, ever terminating in the physical — endless 
repetitions, in fact, of the same forms of force, — they 
never lead us out of the labyrinth, but only extend 
farther and farther, on every side, the limitless unknown. 
The soul cannot rest in this. It would know the 
meaning of nature. It earnestly asks : What is it all 
about? The inquiry itself is a religious one, and re- 
ligion alone can furnish the answer. However dim or 
feeble this may be, it immediately elevates us above the 
depressing effects of mere physical knowledge. But 
religion without revelation, or faith in some kind of 
communion with the Infinite mind, is a shadow. Hence, 
the idea never lost sight of in these discourses : In 
Theology, in Christianity, in the Holy Scriptures, which 
we receive as the Word of God, there is a grandeur of 
thought unknown to any scheme of science, and which 
puts the humblest believer, however uncultured and 



vi PREFACE. 

unlearned, above the proudest intellect that is a stranger 
to any such influence. As Christians we should not 
hesitate to avow this, and firmly maintain it. We should 
appeal directly to Christian experience, as a mighty fact 
which science has no right to overlook. God's Word, 
if it be indeed God's Word, must be a Xoyog £wv kcli 
evepyijg, a "living power." It is not to be merely 
defended, or made the subject of tame apologies. It is 
to be carried with us, not as an obsolete relic, carefully 
enclosed in a guarded ark, but as our banner in front of 
the host. With this we conquer. Without it the most 
ingenious argumentation can only yield a seeming 
victory. " The Majesty and Glory of God beaming in 
the Scriptures," as some of our older divines were fond 
of calling it ; this is to be our " Refuge and our Strength." 
As is said in the closing sentence of the Fifth Lec- 
ture : " The Bible itself must be brought out as the 
best defence against infidelity, — the Bible itself, not 
only as the great standing miracle of history, but as 
containing unearthly ideas for which no Philosophy, no 
Theory of Development, can ever account. To such 
study it will reveal itself as ' the Power (the Svva^ig, or 
healing virtue) of God. Other defences are indeed 
important, but without this, they are shorn of the great 
strength which can alone make them available to the 
pulling down of strongholds and the overthrow of 

the truth's unwearied foes." 

T. L. 

Schenectady, June 4th, 1875. 



CONTENTS 



LECTURE I. 

THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM, - - - - II 

LECTURE II. 

THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL, £7 

LECTURE III. 

THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. — WORLDS IN SPACE, IO3 

LECTURE IV. 

COSMICAL ARGUMENT CONTINUED. — WORLDS IN 

TIME, 141 



LECTURE V. 

THE KINGDOM OF GOD ; OR, THE GREATNESS OF 
THE BIBLE THEISM, AS COMPARED WITH THE 
PHYSICAL, SCIENTIFIC, AND PHILOSOPHICAL, 187 



LECTURE I. 

THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM, 



LECTURE I. 

THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 

The sharp issue — Moral dislike of the Thiestic idea on the part of some — Re- 
luctance at wholly giving it up — Consequence of its abandonment, intellec- 
tual as well as moral desolation — The doctrines of hell and retribution less 
fearful— Chance and Law— Law as sequence merely — Atheism all horror — The 
seriousness of the world problem — The ideas of holiness and justice fasci- 
nating even in their condemnation — Atheism without hope, without secu- 
rity — Atheism may have its after state — The idea of progress has no foun- 
dation in such a view — Nature necessarily finite — Law of growth and decay 
— Cyclical movement — Retrogradations — Must run round and run out — 
Needs a renovating power — Plato and Aristotle — Argument for Diety must 
be something plain, adapted to all minds — Motion demands a Mover — 
Scientific cry : " Give it time enough " — On the Atheistic view the direc- 
tion of the universal movement indeterminable. Illustrations — The Scien- 
tific Insect crawling amid the machinery of the great Harlaam organ ; its 
mighty music all unknown — Higher aspects of the universe — The physical 
subordinate to the hyperphysical — Nature a means^ has no ends termi- 
nating in itself— Mind, idea, first — The perfect, first — Melancholy view of 
Strauss— The despairing Prometheus. 

In a feature of the times which is most dreaded 
may be discovered one of the chief sources of 
hope for the cause of truth. We may reverently 
thank God that it is a day of sharp and inevitable 
issues. The most sacred truths, the foulest form 
of error, stand face to face. Difficulties in re- 
ligion are weakened, or utterly vanish, when we 
see what immensely greater difficulties of irre- 
ligion our yielding to them must finally involve. 
Error must develop itself. It is a law of the 
thinking soul, as sure, as steady in its progress, 



12 VEDDER LECTURES. 

as certain in its results, as any alleged evolution 
of the physical world. Error must develop 
itself. It is especially true of religious error. It 
has no tenacity, no holding-place. It cannot 
stand still ; it must keep on, wandering farther 
and farther from the light, until it comes to that 
precipice of atheism beyond whose verge, or 
beneath whose verge, lies 6 ^ocpog rov onorovg elg 
al&va, " the very blackness of darkness for ever." 
That issue is now presenting itself, short and 
sharp. The haze which has covered " the bridge 
of the war," as Homer calls it, — that has rendered 
indistinct and confused the middle ground of the 
battle-field — that has prevented our seeing truly 
the dividing lines of the opposing hosts — is fast 
clearing up. There is revealed a spectacle that, 
in one sense, may indeed be called appalling, and 
yet is full of encouragement in respect to the issue 
of the great conflict. Natural religion is gone ; 
the old forms of deism have departed ; difficulties 
of Scripture, questions of inspiration and canon- 
icity are thrown into the background ; pantheism 
has dropped its mask; apparent extremes have 
come together ; a false spiritualism is found to be 
but a spectre of the grossest materialism. The 
mirage is dissolving ; the ghosts have fled ; and 
now there stand directly confronting each other, 
the two mighty foes that all along through all the 



THE FEARFULNESS OF A THEISM. \ 3 

illusions, and all the obscurities of the darkened 
battle-field, have been the only real antagonists. 
On the one side stands Christianity, the old Chris- 
tianity, the only Christianity that has ever had 
power for the souls of men ; on the other, blank 
atheism, with all the appalling desolation that 
connects itself with the thought of a godless 
world. As thus presented, we cannot doubt the 
final result. Our greatly disordered humanity is, 
indeed, full of paradoxes. The Apostle's charge 
is true. There is something in man's moral con- 
dition that makes painful the thought of a per- 
sonal God when brought very nigh the soul. 
How to preserve something of the theistic idea, 
and yet avoid this disturbing moral conscious- 
ness, has been the problem ever since Adam 
" hid himself from the presence of the Lord God 
in the trees of the Garden." All history has 
shown how from this effort came nature-worship, 
pantheism, thence polytheism and foul idolatry. 
In this fallen and falling tendency, the divine 
idea is ever becoming more and more deformed 
on the one hand, or dimmed on the other, — ever 
more and more assimilated to ourselves in gross- 
ness, or philosophically refined away into an ab- 
straction, an idea, a cause, a power, a bare force, 
divested, as far as possible, of all moral attributes. 
And yet there is a struggle against its total 



14 VEDDER LECTURES. 

abandonment, when we are brought face to face 
with that sharp decision. When it nears that 
awful verge, humanity — the common humanity, 
as distinguished from that of the frigid specu- 
latist, the common humanity, with its hopes 
and fears, its weariness and dissatisfaction — starts 
back with shuddering awe. It cannot take that 
last plunge, that reckless leap into total darkness. 
Religion cannot indeed be thought of by it with- 
out the accompaniment of fearful ideas ; but here 
is something still more fearful. Much as it may 
have disliked the moral and retributive as insep- 
arable from the personal aspect of the divine 
character, it cannot bear the thought of a uni- 
verse without a creator, without a governing 
mind, without a providence, without a judge 
of right and wrong, making an eternal dis- 
tinction between them, approving the one and 
condemning the other with an intensity to which 
the strongest human approval and condemnation 
can bear no comparison. It cannot part finally 
with the idea so deeply planted in the human 
soul, entering into all the mythologies, dramatic- 
ally and epically represented in the world's 
highest ideals, that good must conquer evil, that 
right must triumph over wrong, that truth must 
prevail to the discomfiture of error, that there is 
to be an eschatology, whatever difficulties of 



THE TEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. i$ 

place and time may be connected with such a 
thought — a latter-day development, somehow, 
and somewhere, that shall clear up the confusion 
and darkness that now cover the face of nature 
and the history of man. It may not logically 
reason out the position, but it feels unerringly 
that the total loss of the idea of God brings with 
it an effacement of all these distinctions. There 
is no virtue, no holiness, no right. There is no 
truth ; it has no reality except as God's truth, as 
the emanation of an eternal mind, or its image as 
reflected in the finite comprehensions of the 
human soul. Facts may remain, or those se- 
quences of facts which some call laws, but they 
represent nothing ; they have no meaning, no 
idea. The intellectual universe is as truly gone 
as the moral. It is in the latter aspect, however, 
that the thought most readily comes home to us, 
and in all its withering desolation : The cosmos, 
like a vessel tossed in infinite space, driven we 
know not where on the currents of time, with 
no hand at the helm, no eye upon the compass, 
no course assigned or assignable, no reason con- 
ceivable why it should not ultimately drift in 
one direction as well as in another : Man, like 
a bubble appearing for a moment on the top 
of the nightly wave, mirroring for a moment 
the heaven of stars above, then vanishing into 



r 6 VEDDER LECTURES. 

the void and formless deep. And then, too, 
there is the terribleness of nature, when there 
has wholly departed the belief in any power 
that can either protect us against it, or in any 
wisdom that can give us a reason, or furnish 
the ground of any conceivable reason, why we 
suffer from it, or why we should struggle with 
its irresistible forces. It is the thought of a 
universe without a guardian, without a Father, 
without anything to shield us from the direst 
woes that chance may bring, or a nature infini- 
tesimally known in its parts, and utterly un- 
known in its great whole of power — a nature 
which we see to be full of the most awful ca- 
tastrophes as they have appeared in the past, 
and which, for aught we know, may be im- 
measurably exceeded in the future. This may 
be called an overdrawn picture of gloom, but 
it hardly goes beyond that given by Strauss 
himself in his latest most melancholy book. It 
is true that, though having no better hope for 
himself than that of absorption into nature, he 
grasps at some idea of progress or order, tend- 
ing to the good of the race or of the universe ; 
but this, as we shall endeavor to show, he is 
compelled to borrow from another school, and 
his use of it is only evidence of his despair. 
Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann are more 



THE EEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. iy 

bold, or more unshrinking, in their conclusions. 
" Far better would it have been for this world," 
says the former, " if no living creature had 
ever dwelt upon it." " The universe," says- 
Von Hartmann, " is miserable throughout." What* 
a verification of the Apostle's language : ddeot 
kv rw KoofiGi — " Having no hope and without God 
in the world." 

Men shrink from this when fairly seen in its 
awful desolation. The old religious fear is more 
tolerable. Hell becomes less horrible to the 
thought than such a hopeless atheism. There 
may be a reason for such an idea of fearful retri- 
bution, even if it be true, as some assert, that 
men have invented it for themselves. It is direct- 
ly connected with the thought of moral distinc- 
tions, with their dread consequences when re- 
garded as truly entering into the divine govern- 
ment. A personal God, not indifferent to right 
and wrong ; if not indifferent, then making an in- 
finite difference — approving the one and con- 
demning the other with an intensity of interest 
as much greater than that of any human estimate 
as the ways of the infinite God are above those 
of all finite intelligences ; there is reason in 
this, even as a possibility ; and wherever reason 
enters, there is alleviation, something on which 
the soul can rest, finding, as it does, its own 



1 8 VEDDER LECTURES. 

highest worth in such a moral destiny, even with 
all its alarming consequences. The thought of a 
personal God, not indifferent to sin — this once 
fixed in the mind and clearly held, the transition 
is direct to all the most startling verities of the 
Christian system. Retribution, atonement, grace, 
redemption, a great perdition, a great salvation, 
a great and divine Saviour, all become credible 
when there is truly realized the idea of sin. 
They all rise as it rises in the moral estimate, 
they all fall as it falls. When it goes out, they 
become incredible. Atheism, or what is morally 
equivalent to it, the rejection of the personal idea, 
is the ultimate antithesis of the old churchly 
belief, and one who commences the deviation 
should calmly estimate, in the start, the distance 
to which it must inevitably lead him. 

To the mere scientist, or the mere speculative 
thinker of any class, atheism may not show its 
most frightful face. He is so taken up with him- 
self, so intent upon regarding the universe as de- 
claring the glory of the astronomer or the 
naturalist, that he has little or no thought for 
anything beyond. His eyes are holdenfrom see- 
ing that whatever belittles religion, belittles 
science and philosophy as well, rendering all 
human knowledge and all human aspiration as 
aimless and as valueless as it is ephemeral. His 



THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. ig 

absorption in the physical blinds him to the true 
dignity of man as related to something - above 
him, and transcending nature. In this state of 
mind, atheistic ideas may not distress him. So, 
too, the deep-seated, yet almost unconscious fear 
of a personal Deity may even awaken an instinc- 
tive feeling of relief in anything that veils it from 
the view. We are not afraid of Nature, terrible 
as she is, as long as the thought seems to screen 
us from a greater terror. There is a feeling that 
we can, somehow, take care of ourselves as 
against her. Her earthquakes, her pestilences, 
her upheavals, her terrific devastations, that have 
left such traces in the past, as they may 
come again in the future — all these carry with 
them no such dread, either in kind or degree, as 
that of falling into " the hands of the living 
God." And yet, with all this, there is an appall- 
ing hideousness in blank atheism when it fairly 
confronts our soberest thought. We cannot 
composedly resign ourselves to the notion of in- 
evitable chance, introducing all conceivable 
forms and modes of being — all measure of pos- 
sibilities being excluded by the absence of any 
ruling mind, and the consequent impossibility of 
conceiving any limitations to the rule of contin- 
gency- The survival of the strongest, even ad- 
mitting that some such rule of forces might come 



20 VEDDER LECTURES. 

in without the chance of reversal, may be the 
survival of the worst. The predominance of cer- 
tain tendencies in the start must be wholly con- 
tingent, if it is wholly mindless, and that charac- 
ter cannot be lost in any subsequent movement. 
If it is chance in the beginning, it is chance 
throughout. As a whole, it might have been 
anj^thing else, although in a tendency once origi- 
nated, some partial movements may be con- 
trolled by others, and thus seem to have the ap- 
pearance of means and ends. There is, indeed, 
an effort sometimes made to evade this. Chance 
is an odious term. The intellect, we may say, 
repels it, as well as the moral emotions. It is 
wholly idealess; it altogether eludes our think- 
ing, unless we attempt to transform it in some- 
thing else. It has been said, therefore, that 
chance is excluded by the idea of law, and that 
it is not so much in itself the antithesis of mind, as 
it is the opposite of method, order, recurring se- 
quence. There has been lately a labored attempt 
to prove this ; but those who assert it use words 
without meaning. Law as applied to nature, 
may indeed be said to be a figure : but is it not 
one to which we are forced if we would connect 
with our language any conceptions whatever? 
No more in the physical than in the moral and 
the political, can we separate law from the idea 



THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 2 I 

of a law-giver ; and we must either wholly fall 
away from such idea, or we must trace it up, 
through man, through nature, to a pure personal^ 
mind. Without such a starting-point, the law 
itself, if we continue to call it so, the movement, 
the direction, in distinction from any other 
movement or direction, is a pure contingency. 
It is not difficult, we think, to detect the fallacy 
here. Had chance, among the infinite chances, 
produced any other state or system of things 
than that which now exists, it would, as far as 
we know, have been equally law, that is, equally 
entitled to that name as given to the sequence 
of facts. Had it been any other state of things, 
it would have had series of events capable of 
some kind of correlation. It would have had 
near sequences, remote sequences, intermediate 
sequences, hidden sequences, perhaps, we could 
not trace, and then they might have been called 
hidden laws received hypothetically, and after- 
wards verified, or modified, when there were dis- 
covered the intervening steps or links, as we 
would then call them. But these sequences, these 
connections with no other discoverable nexus 
than contiguity, might also have been something 
else, and no reason can be given why they 
would not, in that case also, have been laws 
as well as those that are found. Whatever is, 



22 VEDDER LECTURES. 

is law, in whatever way events may follow. Law 
becomes sequence, and nothing more. We 
only cheat ourselves when we attempt to dis- 
guise it under another name. Every effort to 
get out of this utterly fails, until we connect 
them with mind, either near or remote, and then 
alone does this unthinkable conception of chance, 
TVX 7 !, mere happening, cease to haunt our souls. 
On the materialistic hypothesis, the very ideas 
in our minds, through which we seem to rec- 
ognize something more than sequence in events 
— such as the ideas of order, relation, causality — 
are themselves but products of this mindless, 
Godless power, and thus themselves as much 
contingencies as the outward sequences to which 
they are applied. Order might have been dis- 
order if the atomic apparatus of our thinking 
had been so disposed. The positive philosophy, 
neither as first set forth by Comte, nor as de- 
lusively modified by Spencer and Mill, has any 
recognition of them as eternal, and necessary 
ideas. And so, as between chance and mind, it 
has no right to recognize any intervening 
power. Law has really no place in such a 
scheme, except as the gliost of that divine idea 
which the atheistic materialist imagines he has 
slain. 

There have been briefly stated some of the 



THE TEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 23 

things which may render atheism not only toler- 
able, but even desirable, for certain minds. But, 
after all, to the sober human thought it is an ap- 
palling conception, and men will not long remain 
under its gloomy shadow. When we are com- 
pelled to look the monster in the face, it is all 
horror. The sternest system of moral retribution 
ever connected with a theistic creed, challenges 
a preference. As has already been said, hell is 
less frightful than a Godless nature. There may 
be a reason for a condition of awful severity. It 
connects itself with the ideas of justice, of benev- 
olence, of acting for a reason, and that reason 
the highest good of rational and moral being. 
We cannot bear to lose these ideas, though feel- 
ing that we take them at an awful risk. Our 
own reason and our own experience are sufficient 
to convince us of the possibility of something far 
beyond us here. It is not difficult for us to ad- 
mit that our own moral state may be a fallen one, 
or such that we cannot estimate aright the 
heights and depths of the moral system of the 
universe. The human mind gets a glimpse of 
the idea that great glory, great exaltation, are 
connected with such a view, and that these are 
necessarily associated with the thought of great 
peril. Life thus viewed becomes a fearful thing. 
We tremble when we think in what an awfully 



24 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



serious world we live ; and yet there is a fascina- 
tion for the human mind, even for the depraved 
human mind, in the idea of an infinite justice and 
an infinite holiness, though involving the thought 
of infinite severity towards the unholy and the 
unjust. Commensurate with it is that other idea 
of infinite goodness which the rational soul 
affirms as a necessary attribute in the conception 
of Deity, even though the sense-evidence of its 
manifestation may be overpowered by an im- 
mense balance of seeming evil in the world in 
which we dwell, or even did we find ourselves in 
a department of the universe where nothing 
could be discerned but unalleviated and uncom- 
pensated woe. There is something sublimely 
terrible to man in the idea of this perfect divine 
holiness. It so condemns us, whilst giving such 
an awful dignity to our being in its moral rela- 
tions to such an attribute. It transcends all other 
moral ascriptions. The Holy One ! There is 
no language of the Bible, no epithet of Deity 
that has such an awe for us. And yet, as I have 
said, it has a fascination for the contemplative 
spirit, even when deeply conscious of its own un- 
holiness. The thought is perfectly conceivable : 
a human soul, fearful in respect to its own 
moral condition, trembling even under the dread 
of condemnation, yet preferring this personal 



THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 



25 



risk to the utter loss of that glorious conception 
of the ineffable righteousness, so grand even for 
the intellect, could we separate it from the moral 
emotion. The "correlation of forces," the high- 
est power the materialist admits ! How it pales 
before the sublimity of this theistic language : 
" The Righteous Governor of the Universe." 
The Holy One " in whose sight even the heavens 
are not pure." There is, indeed, a fearfulness in 
the theistic thought, an awe even in its aspect 
of beneficence ; but it is, at the same time, the 
ground of all hope, as it is of all human dignit}^ 
We cannot do without it. We cannot lower it, 
though it so condemns us. 

But atheism is without hope, without glory, 
as it is without reason. It has its own terrors, 
with nothing to calm them. It gives the soul no 
security against the direst conceivable evils, 
whilst it takes away every moral ground or rea- 
son for believing in any ultimate triumph of 
truth and goodness. Such a hope illumines the 
darkest aspect of theism : " Clouds and dark- 
ness are round about God, but righteousness and 
judgment are the foundation of His throne." 
There is a reason for everything. In the godless 
view there is a reason for nothing. Every de- 
structive movement is conceivable, possible, and 
even probable, — only give it time enough, as a 



26 VEDDER LECTURES. 

class of scientists are so fond of saying. There 
may be retrogradations, deteriorations, — if we 
may use such words where there is no standard 
according to which they may be reckoned, no 
hyperphysical measure by which they may be 
determined. There may be a progress, seem- 
ingly such, yet only a progress in horror. 
There is no security, even, against the direst 
forms of evil that are feared or fancied as con- 
nected with the religious view itself. This awful, 
unknown nature may have its devil and its hell. 
As it has produced monsters in the past, so may 
it continue to produce monsters in the future. 
It may supersede man by the evolution of a new 
race, transcending in depravity, as it transcends 
in strength and demonic sagacity, the one that for 
six thousand years — twenty thousand, say some 
— has made this world a Golgotha of crime and 
misery. If we follow on the analogy, we cannot 
refuse to admit that there may be evolved a 
state of things which shall throw into the shade 
the enormities of all preceding periods. Take 
away the ideas for which we are indebted to re- 
ligion and revelation ; view man simply as a 
product of nature, with no other hopes than 
nature gives, and we are safe in saying that no 
one of the geological ages has surpassed in de- 
structive enormity, in irrational waste of life, 



THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 2 J 

the human cycle. Had we remained gorillas, the 
earth would not have been so filled with blood — 
with crimes against nature exceeding in horror 
all actions that beasts could commit. My 
hearers will not mistake me here, nor misunder- 
stand the hypothesis of total and hopeless irre- 
ligion on which such statements of human facts 
and human possibilities are grounded. We may 
take a step beyond this. Paradoxical as the lan- 
guage seems, nature may produce a false God. 
Give it time enough and there may come out of 
the physical evolutions some dire consciousness, 
corresponding to that awful being whom the 
infidel imagination gives us in its deformed cari- 
cature of the Scriptural Deity — a power vast, 
malignant, irresistible, having in it the concen- 
trated evil drawn from all the productive forces 
of the universe. Given a past eternity for 
nature's working, she may have long since pro- 
duced such a being, having his seat of power 
somewhere in the infinite space, and extending 
to remotest distances his malignant rule. And 
so, too, in regard to another life, another state of 
being for man. Irreligion sometimes boasts that 
she has slain that chimera of superstition. 
Man may now eat and drink without that haunt- 
ing fear of something after death. But neither for 
this does atheism give security. The human 



2 8 VEDDER LECTURES. 

protoplasm may live on, carrying with it the hu- 
man consciousness, the human identity. It is 
one of the forces of the universe, and may pre- 
serve its individuality in other conditions, or as 
correlated to other forces. Science can give no 
security against this, or against any evils its 
changed physical condition may involve. It may 
still be true that the conscious sensualist " lifts 
up his eyes, being in torment" — the torment of 
an unknown physical hell. 

Or we may take another view coming out of 
that doctrine of atoms to which atheism has 
run for shelter since the days of Democritus. 
Although the microscope has never made an ap- 
proach to this mysterious domain, never having 
brought to light an atom, or a molecule, or even a 
molecular combination, yet here, in this utterly 
unknown region, a certain kind of science finds 
life, consciousness, memory, thought, imagination, 
reason, will — all that constitutes personality or in- 
dividuality in our present state of being. We 
are what the atoms make us, nothing more. 
And this, too, their making, resolves itself into 
site, number, relation — in a word, arrangement of 
constituent atomic points. We can conceive of 
nothing else ; and here the thinking of the com- 
mon mind is as clear and trustworthy as that of 
the most scientific, since to both this atomic 



THE TEARFULNESS OF. A THEISM. 2 g 

world is alike unknown. All that we can say is 
that the doctrine gives no security against that 
dreaded idea that man may live again — may live 
in pain, in agonies inconceivable. Take time 
enough, and apply to it the mathematical 
doctrine of chances, there arises not merely a 
possibility, but a high probability, growing ever- 
more nearer to an absolute certainty, if this 
atomic hypothesis of the origin of life have any 
truth. Of any individual man now existing it 
says that his spiritual powers are but the results 
of such or such a combination of these elements 
of all being. They make him what he is, and he 
has no other being. From them come not only 
his flowing body, but his thought, mind, will, 
consciousness — yea, even what he calls his rea- 
son, though that, too, is only position, arrange- 
ment, number, as much as his sense or his very 
flesh. Now, in the infinite tide of surging ma- 
terial being, these atoms, or precisely similar 
atoms, may come together again. It is extreme- 
ly probable, on the doctrine of chances, that they 
will come together again — the when or the where 
in no way affecting the estimate or the identity of 
the being. They come together just as they were, 
whether a moment before, or at a time which the 
longest decimal notation fails to estimate — they 
come together at last, and there he is again, the 



30 VEDDER LECTURES. 

same consciousness, the same memory, or, so far 
as these constitute identity (and we cannot con- 
ceive of it separate from them), the same identi- 
cal being, carrying with him all the misery of his 
former existence, enhanced by the absence of all 
security against ten thousand fold greater misery 
in the future. There is no hand at the helm of 
the universe, and there is no telling, no conceiv- 
ing the horrors into which it may drift. 

But there is the idea of progress, say some — 
progress continually tending towards a better 
state, towards a higher order, a higher happi- 
ness, a higher intelligence — in a word, a higher 
good. Some such dream meets us, now and 
then, in the writings of Herbert Spencer. But 
what is meant here by higher and lower? To 
determine this, in respect to any movement, we 
w T ant a standard, a rule, a direction, out of and 
higher than such movement. If there is nothing 
transcending nature, nothing outside of nature, 
nothing for which nature itself exists, how then 
are we to measure it, or ascertain its tendencies ? 
We are in the balloon ; no star above is seen ; 
how know we whither it is going? We have no 
sighting point for our survey. Progress towards 
what? This must always remain the question. 
And then, even if we can get a measure, or fix a 
direction, what assurance against retrograda- 



THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 31 

tions or deteriorations ? Everything in the 
smaller nature, or natures, that fall under the eye 
of our science, presents the turning or cyclical 
aspect. Birth, growth, decay, death, dissolution, 
we can conceive a reason for them as explained 
by the relation of things to a sphere above 
nature ; we can believe that they have a counter- 
acted or a regulator, or a compensation, or some 
clearly-explained end in some higher system of 
ideas. Without this, however, there is no resist- 
ing the analogy that drives us on to extend this 
law of growth and decay, of cyclical change, to 
the universal nature as well as to the smaller 
natures that always exhibit it as far as our induc- 
tion extends. The whole cosmos may wax old 
and decay. Scientists were once puzzled with 
the apparent anomalies of the solar system, such 
as change in aphelion and perihelion, shortening 
of orbits in one direction, undue lengthening of 
them in another, all indications of disorder that 
might terminate in remediless decay and final 
ruin. La Place, it is said, showed the contrary 
of this — that is, he proved the perpetual stabil- 
ity of the solar system. Apparent disorders 
had their maxima and minima, and thus the great 
order would go on for ever. But, admitting that 
he had shown this, or something like it, in re- 
gard to the solar system as a thing by itself, 



32 VEDDER LECTURES. 

separated from the universal cosmos, and having 
its own correlation of forces — admitting that all 
its apparent irregularities were counteracting 
checks to each other, so that none of its mem- 
bers would, by means of them, ever get too far 
from the sun, and thus be thrown off as wander- 
ers in space, or too near, and thus be drawn into 
the vortex of its consuming fires — admitting all 
this, we say, his purely mathematical argument, 
though holding true of the data immediately 
before him, did not take into account other dis- 
orders, other decays, other redundancies, other 
retrogressions that might have their causal force 
in the internal constitution of each member. Ac- 
cording to the present nebular and ring hypothe- 
sis, they had been for countless ages throwing off 
their heat, radiating into infinite space, cooling, 
condensing, diminishing in magnitude, increasing 
in density, changing their relative distances and 
attractions. The great central body had, during 
the same countless ages, been undergoing in- 
calculable transformations. It was, therefore, an 
argument purely mathematical, purely hypothet- 
ical, based on assumed magnitudes, masses, 
densities, and mean distances, as they are now 
seen, or supposed to be. It did not take into ac- 
count — it could not take into account — other dis- 
ordering influences that might come from the 



THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 33 

unnumbered bodies floating in infinite space 
outside the solar system. It overlooked the 
vaster revolutions and evolutions in which our 
sj^stem and our earth must participate, however 
slow the changes that might thereby be pro- 
duced in the relations of its parts, or however 
imperceptible the motions determinative, at any 
time, of its own absolute place in the universe. 
These are views to which the most modern 
observation is now forcing us. If trustworthy, 
they give us a glimpse of an immeasurable un- 
known, in relation to which our science, now so 
greatly lauded, is truly a smaller thing than w T as 
the knowledge of Ptolemy, as compared with 
that which was revealed in the first discoveries 
of the telescope. The ancient centre is again un- 
settled, but the true centre is as far as ever from 
being fixed. As thus compared, infinitesimal is 
the enlargement of our knowledge, infinitesimal 
is any fancied increase in the value of our cosmic- 
al speculations. One word, one promise, one 
whispered hope that we can believe in as coming 
to us from the Infinite Father, is more than worth 
it all. We have learned distances, motions, — we 
have a dream of correlated forces ; that is the 
sum of our attainment. It is almost wholly 
mathematical. La Place, with his Mechanique 
Celeste, is as small here as Hipparchus. In one 



34 VEDDER LECTURES. 

sense he is far behind Pythagoras with his 
sublime imagination of the " music of the 
spheres." 

But waiving all that as utterly beyond our 
reach, let us proceed to other and more general 
considerations. We remember how this view of 
La Place in respect to the stability of the solar 
system was hailed by the Christian world. It 
was, however, on the ground of its furnishing, 
or its being supposed to furnish, to those who 
needed it, an argument for a divine idea, a divine 
care, in the originating and in the adjustment of 
our solar system. It was the work of the great 
geometrician, as Socrates styles him. Not so La 
Place himself. He may have smilingly accepted 
the gratitude of the pleased religionist, but he 
saw no hand of God in the cosmos. The heav- 
ens told the glory of the French astronomer, 
not of the Great Architect above. Their interest 
lay in furnishing the diagram, the black-board, 
as we may style it, for his mathematical specula- 
tions. They were filled only with sines and 
cosines, tangents, differentials, integrals, infinite 
series, relations simply of number, figure, dis- 
tance, motion, space ; empty of all else. To him 
this principle of counteracting order, of assumed 
stability, belonged to nature itself; and that was 
something he could never prove. An inherent 



THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 



35 



power of recovery, or of rising- from a really 
lower to a really higher state, an inherent rectifi- 
cation of a real disorder, without aid from a 
plane above the natural — such a property as this 
no science could ever demonstrate. The might- 
iest application of the calculus fails here. Mathe- 
matical theory and induction are both unable to 
show that any great section of nature, much less 
the great whole of nature, is exempt from the 
principle of growth, maximum, decay — in a 
word, of a necessary finiteness, which the smaller 
inductions have invariably proved to belong to 
every partial nature, from the plant to the grow- 
ing, decaying, and disruptured planet. The 
condition of growth seems to necessitate that 
of decay. The force required to keep an organ- 
ism at its maximum must be greater than that 
required to reach it ; since all beyond must be 
an addition, a coming of more from less, which 
is the same with something from nothing. The 
coiled spring must first relax its tension, and 
then return with more or less rapidity in its 
recoil to its former state. So that which has no 
other origin than a nebula in its lowest state of 
material existence, and no other law of its being 
than the condensation, or the unwinding of that 
nebula, whichever view we take, forbids the idea 
of eternal progress, or of unchanging movement 



36 VEDDER LECTURES. 

in either direction. It must have its cycle, re- 
turning through all changes, either to perish, or 
to make again the same revolution, thus accom- 
plishing a cycle of cycles, in which each maxi- 
mum is continually less than the preceding, until 
it goes out, or is lost, or assumes some new form 
in the great whole of forces, therein to repeat a 
series of similar perishing revolutions. Whatever 
grows may decay — must decay. So induction 
teaches, if it is to be our only guide. Now it is a 
peculiar feature of the modern scientific infidel- 
ity, that it assumes this of the universe. The cos- 
mos grows as well as the fungus. Solar systems, 
stellar systems, all came out of that lowest state 
called the nebula. Science can show no leap in 
the process of growth and decay, no point where 
perpetuity necessarily comes in, or the analogy 
permits us to stop short of the idea that there is in 
nature, even as a whole, a necessary finiteness of 
force, however vast the extent of space through 
which its manifestations may be dispersed. It 
must run round, and finally run out, whether to 
come up again, or come out again, as the old Stoics 
maintained in their doctrine of rarefactions, or to 
be no more for ever. The necessarily infinite 
alone remaineth ad eternum, whilst all things 
below the infinite must have the measure and the 
uses that it appointeth to them. " The grass 



THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 37 

withereth, the flower fadeth," nature comes and 
goes, but " the Word of the Lord abideth for ever." 
All that is not God is necessarily finite, except as 
He sustains, restores, perpetuates. 

The reasoning of Plato here, and to some ex- 
tent of Aristotle, can never be refuted. I refer 
to the great argument of the latter philosopher 
by which he proves the necessity of the dttLvrjTog, 
the Immovable, as a principle lying above mo- 
tion and the movable ; in other words, an infinite 
mind, an eternal thought, as the only ground of 
stability in the universe. So Plato shows that 
the existence of antagonisms, or the generation 
of opposites, or correlations of forces in nature, 
must come from something above the plane of 
the physical. For although such seeming equi- 
libriums may be produced, as it were, by partial 
currents, or counteracting eddies, in the same 
movement, yet nature as a whole can never of 
herself generate a direction above that, or the 
opposite of that, in which she is tending - , and 
which, unless counteracted or regulated by a 
power from without, must inevitably bring her 
to a suicidal end. It is idle to say that these 
men, great thinkers as they were, had not 
science enough to warrant them in making such 
declarations. The whole question lies above any 
sphere of science, or fact induction, even were 



38 VEDDER LECTURES. 

not the comparative difference here between the 
ancient and modern knowledge the infinitesi- 
mal we have shown it to be. The illustrations, 
too, presented by these old authorities, are as 
good as any that are furnished by the vocabu- 
lary of our modern progress. If genesis, devel- 
opment, says Plato, or what we call evolution, 
or progressive movement, were ever evdela, 
straight onwards, in one direction, it must 
finally tend to extinction. Whatever the princi- 
ple, be it rarefaction or condensation, sepa- 
ration or combination, cold or heat, cooling or 
heating, it must, in the one case, reach a state 
where all cohesion, all organization ceases, or, 
in the other, come to a stand in which all life, 
all motion, terminates in absolute immobility. 
Or, to use his own most expressive language, 
" things would cease becoming and genesis would 
be at an end." In more modern terms, the cor- 
relation of forces, if given an eternity to work 
in, would at last produce an absolute equilib- 
rium, a state of rest which is the maximum of 
force, even as motion, on the other hand, or re- 
garded as a departure from this state, is ever 
a spending or letting out of force, and must 
terminate in the absolute nothingness of iner- 
tia. Hence, that the cosmos may live, says the phi- 
losopher, there must be at some point or points, 



THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 39 

a KafiTrrjj or turning round, a deviation from the 
progress or tendency in which it is going, a 
change from one law or from one movement to 
another, and this can be no product of that law, 
or that movement, from which it is turned. 
There may be such a seeming law of cyclicity, 
or self-regulating cyclical return, in the partial 
natures; but in them it must come from other 
partial natures without, which, at certain points, 
connect with and counteract, thus causing par- 
tial deviations. As applied, however, to a na- 
ture regarded as universal, and having nothing 
outside of it, this idea, of course, cannot be ad- 
mitted. There, the result of such a right on- 
ward movement is demonstratively inevitable. 
Nothing can save from it but the supposition 
of dynamical laws, that is, principles of motion 
and force, utterly different from those our best 
science acknowledges in physical and cosmical 
investigations. Gravitation must destroy itself, 
if there be no principle, higher, remoter, stronger, 
in the universe. 

The perverseness of an atheistic science may 
drive us to a mode of argument that seems 
labored and abstract ; but it is in order to meet 
this perverseness on its own ground. The truth 
must be something more simple than this — 
something which the common, healthy mind 



40 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



perceives, as well as the most reflective and 
logical. It cannot be that God, who made the 
human intellect, could have intended that the 
proof of His own existence, of His own intel- 
lect, we may say, should be so difficult, or so 
little obvious, as to allow the soul to have, 
even for a moment, an excuse for its scepticism. 
We should never depart from the intuitive idea 
that in motion, in change of any kind, in the 
least phenomenal deviation of anything (whether 
whole or part) from a former state, there is 
evidence of will somewhere in space and time, 
of a purpose and a volition without which such 
deviation never would have been, however many, 
or however undiscoverable, the connecting links 
of causation. We should hold to this as a 
proof preceding any that we draw from the 
more recondite field of organic life. In truth, 
once admit motion, self-motion, to be a prop- 
erty of matter, and it is not easy to deny that 
life also may be such. It is not easy to dis- 
tinguish between life and self-motion. Hence 
Aristotle, in the argument referred to, begins at 
the beginning. Motion demands a mover, and 
that ultimately a prime mover, itself unmoved 
and immovable, or a will originating motion, 
itself outside of any moving chain of cause and 
effect. In the same way the argument of Soc- 



THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 



41 



rates against the atheists in the Tenth book of 
the Laws. Motion is proof of soul. In an after- 
state, clearer perhaps intellectually, because 
purer morally, we may wonder at ourselves for 
ever allowing this intuition to be obscured. 
Then may we feel, as we have never felt before, 
the reasonableness of that chiding, though gen- 
tle remonstrance : " O ye of little faith, where- 
fore did you doubt ? " 

The sceptical scientists are very fond of draw- 
ing on time. If any form of " evolution " be 
insisted on, or of *' natural selection," or any 
adjustment of atoms driven by chance, and after 
infinite misses and infinite incongruities falling, 
at last, into something to which we give the 
name of order — the demand is ever for time, 
more time. If we do not see species coming out 
of species, or any of the half-way transition pro- 
cesses, then science becomes humble again ; we 
are reminded of the limited observations neces- 
sarily inadequate for such a vast induction. Only 
grant time enough, and we can prove the pos- 
sible happening of anything conceivable. Now 
this accommodating demand may be turned the 
other way, and to the confusion of those who 
are most fond of making it. They would keep 
it within some bounds of the decimal notation. 
Billions, trillions, decillions, might, perhaps, 



42 VEDDER LECTURES. 

satisfy their very modest hypotheses. But as 
against them, we may draw at once on the 
bank of eternity. How long before we reach it, 
or even make an approach to it, ought an infinite, 
ever right-onward moving nature to have passed 
over the finite, the very finite, progress to which 
we see she has now arrived. Or, whatever may 
be the direction she is taking, at what an 
ancient time in the long-past eternity, must she 
have to come to its ultimatum, if there be no 
hand to make the turn of which Socrates speaks. 
How many ages ago must there have been reached 
the immovable equilibrium or the irrecoverable 
dispersion? An eternity before our day must 
this binding or loosing — for motion is ever the 
spending of force — have brought all things to 
their maximum of solidity or their minimum of 
rarefaction ; in both of which states all life per- 
ishes, all motion and resistance as the very con- 
ditions of manifested sentient being. The machine 
has run down, or run out. It is a consequence 
of that finiteness which necessarily belongs to 
everything moving in time and space. At such a 
juncture, the Platonic myth in the Politicus sup- 
poses the hand of Deity again to take the helm. 
On the hypothesis that excludes such a control- 
ling and restoring idea, nature, or the physical 
universe, has come to a dead-lock from which 



THE TEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 



43 



there is no renewal. If we take it in one direc- 
tion, the result, as has been already said, is a 
balance of forces, a static equilibrium of resistance, 
which is only another name for absolute rest. If 
we follow it in the other, the only idea left is that 
of utter dispersion, which is only another form 
of absolute inertia. Thus are we driven to the 
thought of a power. outside of and above nature, 
a power demanded for its conservation and res- 
toration as much as for its primal origin. " Of 
old hast thou founded the earth ; the heavens are 
the work of Thy hands. They perish, but Thou 
remainest. As a garment do they wear out ; 
Thou renewest them, and they are renewed. 
But Thou art HE (the same), and of Thy times 
there is no end." 

But, aside from any such reasoning, the doc- 
trine of progress, in which the atheistic scientist 
takes refuge to escape the horror of his own con- 
clusions, or this tendency to a higher and better 
state which Matthew Arnold describes as "a 
making for righteousness," is all a sheer assump- 
tion. How do they know whither nature, the 
universal nature, is going, or whether it be up or 
down ? Certainly not from any induction. The 
atheist, or scientific atheist, is very fond of talking 
of the vast extent of the cosmos ; he very confi- 
dently compares his own views in this respect 



44 VEDDER LECTURES. 

with what he deems the religious narrowness ; 
but as related to the whole, of which he so pre- 
sumptiously judges, what is the mighty difference 
between his knowledge of the universe, as taken 
in all directions, and that of the most ignorant 
religionist of ancient or modern times? We 
speak, of course, comparatively. Franklin's wise 
ephemeron, drawing his inferences as to all sur- 
rounding being from the vernal or autumnal 
changes in the leaf on which he sits, would pre- 
sent the most apt illustration of this folly. Or 
we may imagine the tiny insect crawling in the 
great Haarlem organ. He may be a most scien- 
tific insect, possessing the keenest sense, endowed 
with a vision surpassing all the powers of the 
microscope. There is nothing in his minuteness 
at war with the supposition of his having a most 
mathematical brain, which nature, or the colloca- 
tion of the atoms, or some nice adjustment in the 
correlation of his vital forces, may have bounti- 
fully given to him. There he sits, with all the ma- 
terials for a Mechanique Celeste in the smaller, 
that La Place possessed for the supposed wider 
sphere. He is intent on the study of strings and 
pipes, and the most minute adaptations of the 
mighty apparatus, so far as his angle of vision can 
take in an almost infinitesimal part. He sees the 
valves open and shut ; he traces, for an inch or 



THE FEARFULNESS OF A THEISM. 



45 



two, the cords by which these effects seem pro- 
duced ; he begins to classify them and to talk of 
laws, thus turning phenomena into forces, and 
dignifying mere sequences with the name of 
causes. His induction may rise to the conception 
of mightier pipes, of more distant keys, of 
deeper valves, of hidden strings; but he never in 
this way gets out of the machine. It is, all 
through, as far as he can see, adaptation for the 
sake of adaptation, evolution for the sake of evo- 
lution. But what is it all about? Sometimes, 
as Tyndall occasionally confesses, he may have 
his hour of weakness. Now and then his cere- 
bral organization may become strangely impress- 
ed with the idea of something haunting the ma- 
chinery, or that there is " a spirit in the wheels " 
— a blowing, or breathing in the pipes, which 
none of the sense-causalties before him can ex- 
plain. There comes the faint consciousness of 
some vibrating tremor in the vast surrounding- 
apparatus. It startles him with the idea of some- 
thing greater than he sees. It may be the hope 
of a grander being, or a sense of danger filling 
him with alarm. There is something more 
serious in the machine than he had imagined. Is 
it a dream — a dream that he is dreaming, it may 
be — and from which he shall awake to a higher 
consciousness? There may come, as from a far 



46 VEDDER LECTURES. 

distance, the faint sound of a mighty music, of a 
glorious anthem rolling above. Or there may 
arise in his insect soul, or in some way be given 
to it, the idea of a higher world, a more real 
world, to which this intricate valvular apparatus 
may be subservient, and from which it derives all 
its value. But this he soon dismisses as utterly 
unscientific. He returns again to " common 
sense," to confidence in his sharp eye, his grop- 
ing touch. " The things that are seen ;" they are 
the only realities after all. " The things unseen " 
— all that is supersensual — they belong to the 
world of phantoms which experimental science 
— the only science — can never admit. 

The illustration is a fair one. From induction 
alone it is impossible to determine whether this 
physical apparatus in which we are involved, out 
of which we are evolved, and into which our 
seeming individuality is soon to be resolved again, 
is really tending to order or disorder, or towards 
anything we might indulge our fancy in calling 
higher or lower states of being. The very terms 
point to something out of the physical, above the 
physical — something which measures nature, but 
can never be measured by it. 

Such a comparison is unimpeachable as long as 
we take for its basis any conceivable ratio be- 
tween the infinitesimally known and the infinite 



THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 



47 



unknown. To vary the illustration, however, let 
us suppose an almost invisible insect crawling 
upon the dome of St. Peter's. He possesses a 
sense of vision keener than the human. His 
microscopic eye does, indeed, see chasms, and 
roughnesses, and inequalities, which may disap- 
pear to a survey made from a higher standpoint ; 
but what does it tell him of the purpose for which 
that vast structure was reared ? What does it 
tell him of its transcending spiritual significance ? 
Or, to confine the thought to what might be 
deemed, in strictness, the more proper scientific 
field, what does it tell him even of the space or 
mathematical direction of his seeming progress, 
or whether he is moving on a surface ascending 
or descending, concave or convex, or whether, 
taken as a whole, it may be called plane or 
spherical, or at what rate the vast arc, to which 
his short vision can draw no tangential line, may 
be changing its mighty curvature. 

Equally preposterous is the claim that is made 
to determine, by any scientific induction, the move- 
ment and direction of the cosmos in any higher 
aspect that we may call spiritual, moral, meta- 
physical, ideal — or even in that lower view which 
excludes all but the physical as exhibited solely 
in the phenomena of motion and force. Even if 
the things immediately around us presented no 



48 VEDDER LECTURES. 

anomalies or unevennesses, no apparent retrogres- 
sions or deteriorations, what help do our second 
of time and our inch of space give us towards 
determining anv present state, or future tenden- 
cies, or final evolution, of that great whole of 
being of which we form, physically, so insignifi- 
cant a part? The believer may legitimately 
connect such an idea of progress with that of a 
physical world subordinate to a moral probation, 
and the theatre, ultimately, of a high moral pro- 
duction. This is in true harmony with the 
thought of the cosmos as the work, through 
whatever process of origination and continuance, 
of a personal Deity, infinitely strong, infinitely 
wise, infinitely just and good. It matters not 
whether we say this comes from revelation, or 
has some claim to be regarded as an a priori 
idea of the human soul, or whether we regard 
both these supposed sources as substantially the 
same. If the latter, or the a priori view is pre- 
ferred, it would denote simply something mir- 
rored in the finite from the infinite mind, or a 
reflection from that image of God of which the 
Scriptures speak. On either view, naturalistic, 
theological, or metaphysical, thought, ideas, are<z 
priori somehow, and somewhere. One position 
is that they existed in a necessary, an eternal, 
and an infinite mind, before they came into the 



THE TEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 



49 



human, carrying with them some recognizing 
glimpse of their necessity and infinity. The 
other likewise necessitates what may be called an 
a priori being, but of an infinitely lower kind. It 
would consist in those arrangements of atoms/ 
and those correlations of forces, which, when 
brought out in the lucky confluences of im- 
measurable time, might constitute the individ- 
ual man. We all had our primeval being in 
the nebula ; we were all born out of it, as it will^ 
be to all of us the grave of our existence. But 
with a priori or necessary ideas in any other 
sense, the positivist has nothing to do. He de- 
nies their existence. He assigns them to the 
chimaera region of metaphysics and theology. 
He goes by experiment, in a word, by sense, ac- 
knowledging no higher source for any human 
thought. When he talks, therefore, of progress, 
as Spencer is compelled to do, or of an inherent 
" tendency that makes for righteousness," to use 
some of Mathew Arnold's favorite lingo, he goes 
entirely out of the sphere to which the funda- 
mentals of his philosophy necessarily limit all 
human knowledge. He is trespassing on another 
province of which, at other times he affects to 
speak with contempt. 

It would have been more wise, it may be 
thought, to have taken for the subject of this lec- 
3 



50 VEDDER LECTURES. 

ture a nearer and more threatening form of infi- 
delity. But atheism is the goal to which it all 
is running, even as all irreligion is a dislike to the 
idea of a personal God. We may rejoice, how- 
ever, that it carries its antidote along with it. 
There is nothing, perhaps, that will ultimately 
better subserve the cause of religious belief than 
the last published work of Strauss. After re- 
iterated denials, and long struggles with the 
vortex into which he saw himself irresistibly 
drawn, it is pure atheism at last — blank, unquali- 
fied atheism. The English scientific sceptics 
seem drawing back, but Strauss has pushed on to 
the ultimatum, and it stands before us in all its 
horrors. Nothing that I have said of the awful 
desolation of a soul that comes fairly to see what 
it is to be " without hope and without God in the 
world," presents such an appalling picture as he 
himself has given us after announcing his utter 
loss of faith in God. All his philosophy, all his 
logic, all his scholarship, yield their latest fruit, 
their only fruit, in such an utterance as this : " In 
the enormous machine of the universe, amid the 
incessant whirl and hiss of its jagged iron wheels 
■ — amid the deafening crash of its ponderous 
stamps and hammers — in the midst of this terrific 
commotion, man, a helpless and defenseless crea- 
ture, finds himself placed — not secure for a 



THE TEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 



51 



moment, that on some unguarded motion, a 
wheel may not seize and rend him, or a hammer 
crush him to powder. This sense of abandon- 
ment is at first something awful." Yes, we may 
say, not only at first, but evermore, the more it is 
contemplated, growing denser in its gloom, more 
suggestive of that fearful language of the Scrip- 
ture, " the blackness of darkness forever." In 
other places Strauss would modify the horror 
of such a view by throwing himself upon some 
of those a priori ideas of ultimate order, to which, 
as we have seen, Tie and his confreres have no 
right. But in this terrific passage, he reminds us 
of that wild, despairing farewell to nature, which 
the prince of Grecian dramatists puts into the 
mouth of the Jove-defying Titan, as amidst 
storm and earthquake he goes down into the 
unfathomable subterranean deeps : 

a) firjTpbg efirjg oe(3ag, 0) rcdvrodv 
didrip tcoivbv (f)dog elXioacjv, 
eoopdg fi' d>g endina redox***- 

O thou, my awful mother earth, and thou, 

Aetherial sphere unrolling evermore 

The common light ! Behold ye my dark doom ? 

There is no escape from the terrible machinery 
which Strauss so vividly depicts, and all the hor- 
rors it involves — these horrors, too, made im- 
mensely greater for man from the fact that he 



52 VEDDER LECTURES. 

has the Promethean fire of reason to contemplate 
his inevitable ruin, and just science enough to 
show him how very little his science avails to 
save him from these "jagged wheels," or how 
very little his feeble reforms — opening the way 
often to a more dire disorder — or his transient 
" victories over nature," as he calls them, can 
avert the greatest, and sometimes the least, of 
her catastrophes. The thought of the immor- 
tality of the race, even if there were any hope or 
consolation in that, is as groundless as any other 
part of this sad speculation. What do " the mer- 
ciless wheels" or " ponderous hammers" care 
for races ? Of how many, in the past, has the die 
been broken and cast away ! The race, as well 
as the individual, may be caught on some of these 
"jagged points," or crushed by the defacing 
" stamps " of these remorseless evolutions. We 
fly for refuge to the merciful anthropopathisms 
of the Bible : " He knoweth our frame ; He re- 
members that we are dust; He careth for us." 
But what does nature know or care ? It is all 
darkness — all horror. No retributions of religion 
are so terrible as this atheistic creed ; no super- 
stition presents so fearful a ground of alarm ; for 
with these is ever associated some consoling idea 
of propitiation. A stern Judge, an unyielding 
moral law, a fearful danger as arising out of a 



THE FEARFULNESS OF ATHEISM. 53 

relation having" so much of moral dignity — these 
have in them, for a rational being, more of hope, 
less of pain and despair, than the crushing 
thought of having been brought into being, and 
made to suffer, for no end at all. Whoever sets 
out on the road that must, ultimately lead to this, 
let him count the cost. Let him consult his 
guide-book, whatever it may be, to understand 
what he must come to when he makes his de- 
parture from the more serious forms of religious 
belief for the sake of easier creeds. What has 
been said will not be in vain, if such an impres- 
sion shall have been left on any mind. 



LECTURE II. 

THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 



LECTURE II. 

THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 

Aversion to the idea — Anthropopathism of the common infidel argument 
against a particular Providence — The alleged impossibility of the super- 
natural — The Divine constancy in nature — Moral power of a miracle — Men 
not afraid of nature — The soothing idea of physical law — Nature a screen 
between fallen man and Deity — Still, a fascination in the idea of the super- 
natural — Two kinds of incredibility : that of the sense, and that of the rea- 
son — Illustrations — The scene of the crucifixion — Moral reasons as affecting 
credibility — Moral power of the Biblical supernatural — Illustrations from 
Old Testament ; from the New — Song of the Angels at the Nativity — Com- 
parison between the Bible supernatural and that of all other " sacred 
books " and mythologies — Continual presence in the Bible of the moral 
sublime — The total absence of the supernatural, in such a disordered world 
as ours, would be the greatest wonder — The soul's demand for some extra- 
ordinary Divine manifestations — Childish argument : Nature all, therefore 
nothing above or beside nature — An eternal evolution self-evolved — Ab- 
surdities involved in such a view — The highest in the lowest — More out of 
• less — Impossibility of the supernatural the staple of the rationalistic exe- 
gesis — The subjective truthfulness of the Bible involves the objective 
reality. ' 

A chief characteristic of the most modern 
form of unbelief is its strong aversion to the idea 
of the supernatural. It has lately taken a step 
beyond all former ones, in denying even its pos- 
sibility. This cannot be called a feature of athe- 
ism strictly, for there all distinction between the 
natural and the supernatural wholly disappears 
with the divine idea. It is only, therefore, as 
connected with some form of professed theism 
that it is entitled to our attention : A God, so 
styled, but who interferes not now with nature, 
3* (57) 



58 VEDDER LECTURES. 

never will interfere, never has interfered, except, 
perhaps, at some indefinitely remote beginning 
brought in merely as a logical makeweight to 
some system of causation rising in the least con- 
ceivable degree above chance. The argument 
here sometimes assumes a quasi-religious form. 
God is too great to interfere with an order He 
has once established. He is too wise to inter- 
rupt a work so skilfully planned in the beginning. 
A particular providence, or any care for the 
individual, except as provided for in the great 
whole of things, is inconsistent with His sover- 
eign dignity. He rules the world by laws. 
They are His ministers ; any interference with 
them would imply a defect of knowledge or 
power in their selection and appointment. Thus 
viewed, all alleged miraculous intervention is 
petty, however grand it may sometimes seem to 
our finite view. Thus it is the divine honor 
they would defend as against the belittling con- 
ceptions of the narrow religionist. Sometimes 
it " apes humility." Man, especially the individ- 
ual man, is too insignificant. It is presumptious 
in him to think that he is an object of the Divine 
concern, or that the settled course of things can 
ever be, in the least, affected by his wants and 
his prayers ; it is all a wretched anthropopathy. 
Now. to this it might easily be replied that the 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. $g 

anthropomorphic reasoning is all the other way. 
It is our philosophic pietist who is making God 
altogether such an one as himself, needing ma- 
chinery for the accomplishment of his purposes, 
and incapable of caring for the small, because oc- 
cupied with the great totalities. Man can think 
of but one thing at a time, and this measure he 
applies to God, not perceiving that to depart one 
step from it gives an infinite range that may em- 
brace an infinite multiplicity of objects as well as 
the smallest number. He fails to see that in- 
finity and almightinessdo, of themselves, demand 
the power of entering into the finite, of knowing 
it in its minutest aspects, of surveying it con- 
stantly in its partialities as well as in its totalities ; 
in a word, of exercising the finite act when 
it pleases God, and even of thinking the finite 
thought, or feeling the finite feeling, whenever 
he chooses thus to enter into the mundane or the 
human sphere. One who cannot do this, cannot 
do " all things," as Job confesses, and is, there- 
fore, neither almighty nor infinite. The infinite 
Word becomes flesh and dwells among us; the 
eternal Logos is ever sounding on in nature 
as when first uttered ; it speaks in its minutest 
finities as well as in its greatest wholes. This is 
the grand Scripture doctrine which science fails 
to reach ; this is the sublime equilibrium in the 



60 VEDDER LECTURES. 

Divine character which the Scripture every- 
where so boldly maintains, and from which 
philosophy is ever wavering. A science unphilo- 
sophical as it is irreligious, repudiates it. It can- 
not rise to the conception of worlds transcending 
the physical, of spheres of being higher than na- 
ture, for which nature is made, for which its order 
is sustained, and for which it maybe interrupted, 
if such a deviation of causality be demanded by 
a higher order and a higher law. 

It would not be difficult thus to reply to the 
argument against miracles, or against a particu- 
lar providence, as maintained by this semblance 
of theism. But the position now taken presents 
a somewhat different aspect. It is nothing less 
than a bold denial of the very possibility of the 
supernatural. The older English school of un- 
believers never exactly reached this point. 
Hume's denial of miracles had reference solely 
to their incredibility on the ground of any sense 
evidence, the difficulty of proving them by any 
human testimony whose falsity would not be 
more credible than the alleged miracle itself. In 
other words, it was improbable, most improbable ; 
unreasonable, apparently, but not impossible. 
This latter position is now taken with a blind 
hardihood that does not pretend to reason. It 
very cheaply assumes it as too plain for argu- 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 6 1 

ment. No man of sense — we might take their 
word if confined to its most literal meaning — no 
man of sense, they say, can believe in the super- 
natural. The manner of the assertion, moreover, 
betrays feeling, a hearty dislike of the idea 
rather than the calm, philosophic temperament, 
or supreme love of truth that is so boasted of. 
The mask is thrown off. There is, indeed, a dis- 
honest clinging to some fancied remnant of the 
theistic conception, but for all moral and religious 
purposes, it is that sinking of God in nature 
which no evasions of naming can differentiate 
from the blank atheistic denial. The older view, 
we may say, conceded a divine power over na- 
ture, though ever holding its exercise to be un- 
divine and unreasonable ; the latter denies the 
very power itself, because God and nature are 
one. The supernatural, therefore, is not only un- 
reasonable, but impossible. 

Both have their origin in fear — in that aversion 
to the thought of a personal God so deeply 
seated in the fallen human soul. It is not a 
speculative repugnance. It cannot be shown that 
there is anything irrational in the conception of 
an inconceivably great personality regarded as 
having power, intelligence, and will. The 
ground of fear is in the moral element which it 
is so difficult to keep separate from such a con- 



62 VEDDER LECTURES. 

ception. Especially does this moral dread arise 
when the thought is entertained of some 
separated, isolated act, as it were, in which this 
personal relation of God to finite beings brings 
with it a sense of nearness, and so presents itself 
to us that we cannot thrust the thought away. 
In other words, this moral element most closely, 
and most immediately, connects itself with the 
sight, the belief, or even the conception of any 
miraculous or nature-transcending power. In 
proof of this, the appeal may be safely made to 
the human consciousness ; though even evangeli- 
cal men, so styled, have sometimes taken a differ- 
ent view. The value of miracles, it is maintain- 
ed, is simply in their attestation. They have 
their place as credentials given to the first de- 
liverers of a divine mission; they have simply a 
convincing and a silencing, but not strictly a 
moral power. The truth once given, or seen in 
its own intrinsic evidence, the sign that simply 
called attention to it, is no longer needed. We 
believe without it, it has been said ; we believe 
better without it, and, therefore, nothing is really 
lost by overlooking the marvelous, or the al- 
leged supernatural in the Scriptures ; the essence 
of the truth remains. 

It is true that miracles, if frequent, might lose 
their moral power, just as nature has done. 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL 63 

Had man continued hoi)*, she, too, would have 
been religious, testifying to the " eternal power 
and Godhead " more powerfully than any mirac- 
ulous or extraordinary display. The divine con- 
stancy in nature would then have furnished the 
adorable element. The change in the moral con- 
dition has wholly changed this aspect. Nature 
has become our screen, our veil from the insuf- 
ferable brightness, our hiding-place from the 
terror of that idea of personality from which we 
shrink, even as Adam hid himself from the Lord 
God in the trees of the garden. God must now 
come to him in the thunder voice of supernatu- 
ral manifestation ; but even the effect of this 
would be lost in its frequency. Men would watch 
for sequences, they would hunt up coincidences, 
they would give them the soothing name of law, 
and thus would they make a new screen between 
themselves and God. We can see a reason why 
miracles should be rare ; why more frequent in 
one age than in another ; why they have charac- 
terized certain periods, especially those that be- 
long to the earliest training of the human race ; 
why at times they seem wholly withdrawn, and 
again appear with startling manifestations. The 
miracle may, indeed, be regarded chiefly in the 
light of an attestation demanded by some new 
message from above the sphere of the natural, or 



64 VEDDER LECTURES. 

to arouse an age sinking - into the grossest mate- 
rialism. But still, along with its attesting it has 
ever its intrinsic moral power. Let there once 
be witnessed something which we are compelled 
to ascribe to a supernatural causation, and a new 
feeling, a religious feeling, is at once aroused, 
even though the attesting phenomena should be 
of the slightest kind. A personal will is showing 
itself; God is near; even the most devout soul 
has a new and startling sense of some divine 
presence. It is not the fear of the supernatural 
in itself. The same or a similar feeling may be 
awakened sometimes by witnessing remarkable 
phenomena, less usual, or more astounding, in 
nature itself, and when we think we know the 
causal sequences. In general, we are not afraid 
of nature ; we are not afraid of law, that idol 
of our own creation which we are so fond of 
separating from the idea of a personal lawgiver. 
We can somehow take care of ourselves as 
against these ; we feel more safe with them 
than with the thought of a personal providence ; 
they do not so alarm us as the idea of falling into 
" the hands of the Living God." Even when 
there comes that awful cry of " the pestilence 
that walketh in darkness," we find an opiate in 
the idea of nature ; we are relieved when our 
men of science talk to us so wisely of physical 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 65 

law. " Take heart," it is only something in the 
air or the water. That comforts, though we 
know nothing more. Especially is it so if the 
invading malady be more slow in its course, 
and its steps more visible, though actually more 
destructive than others that frighten us less. 
This is the secret of that £>anic that accom- 
panies the dreaded name of cholera. It is some- 
thing in the air, or in the water, to be sure. 
That gives some relief; but then it comes so 
suddenly, it strikes so irregularly, its move- 
ments are so inexplicable, its probabilities so 
baffle our most studied calculus ; in a word, we 
are so helpless, we can do so little for ourselves, 
or for each other. If there is law in it, it is 
very much the same as though it were not. 
Something irresistible at least, something mys- 
terious and unknown, is very near us. Hence at 
such times all men are religious, whether they 
choose to avow it or not. The speaker calls to 
mind a scientific man of some note who lately 
figured at a Tyndal dinner, and how frightened 
he was in the cholera season of 1849. How far 
it was a religious fear may not be confidently 
said ; but certainly his science, much as it has 
been lauded, gave very little assurance to him- 
self or others. He was a physician, too, confess- 
ing and bewailing the utter inadequacy of his 



66 VEDDER LECTURES. 

skill to furnish any help. He gave up the pa- 
tient. He should not, perhaps, be blamed for 
that ; but then it should have taught him after- 
wards to be a little more merciful to his weaker 
fellow-creatures who lacked his scientific bra- 
very, and who thought that there might possibly 
be some help in prayer. In these great and ter- 
rific manifestations, even of what we believe to 
be strictly physical forces, the awe of the super- 
natural is upon us. No amount of science gives 
assurance when the thunder crash is near, and 
the lightning bolt is falling at our feet, or its 
lurid flame is rising from our stricken place of 
shelter. It is the sense of helplessness which 
alarms, whilst it renders the ordinary distinction 
between the natural and the supernatural so 
powerless in soothing our fears. Calm reason- 
ing, could we be calm, would tell us that the prob- 
abilities of harm are, in the long run, far greater 
from other physical causes that excite less emo- 
tion ; but all that fails to give quiet. In a word, 
God is felt to be close at hand ; our thought of the 
irresistible immediately takes the personal form, 
and no amount of science can drive it away. Now, 
in a still higher measure would this be felt at the 
sight of some appearance which we feel our- 
selves compelled to ascribe to a power above na- 
ture, or to a personal will near by, and intending 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. 6? 

the very thing our eyes behold. This moral 
power of a miracle as bringing nigh the thought 
of a personal God, is strikingly exemplified in 
the language of Peter at the sight of the mirac- 
ulous draught of fishes, when he fell upon his 
knees and besought the Holy One to depart from 
him : e%eXde an' kfiov, " Go away from me for I am 
a sinner man, O Lord." Still more strange is it 
that it should be so, when the supernatural inter- 
vention is one of beneficence and salvation. Even 
that does not divest it of its moral awe ; as when 
the waves were dashing over the ship, and the 
sleeping Christ awoke to still the storm. " They 
were astonished," say Matthew and Luke ; 
" they were greatly afraid," says the more graph- 
ic Mark, and, on this occasion, with the deeper 
insight, — " They feared a great fear," and " They 
said one to another" u Who then is this." rig apa, 
as though the familiar Saviour had suddenly be- 
come strange and unknown ; or as Matthew gives 
it, no-anog konv ovrog, " What kind of a being is 
this," whom " the winds and sea obey ! " 

In a world of holy unfallen beings, as has been 
already said, it would be the sight of nature's 
constancy which would chiefly inspire 'the re- 
ligious feeling, but without that of personal dread. 
There would be no lessening of awe and sub- 
limity in the contemplation of the physical move- 



68 VEDDER LECTURES. 

ments, no burying- of the divine idea, the ever- 
speaking word, the ever-living personal thought, 
in the dead notions of law and necessary se- 
quence. Ever new, ever wonderful, ever har- 
monious would be the cosmical anthem — all mi- 
randa, if not miracula in the special sense we 
now attach to the controverted term. It would 
be a departure from such order, real or seeming, 
that would then suggest the godless thought, or 
carry with it the strange atheistical idea. Instead 
of the intervening " finger of God," as it appeared 
to the terrified Egyptian magicians, it would 
seem rather like a sign of returning chaos, as 
though the hand had let go the helm of the uni- 
verse, or the Shekinah light were going out in 
the " Cosmical sanctuary," leaving it to darkness, 
confusion, and disma}'. With man, in his God- 
forgetting state, the moral influence of a miracle, 
or of a seeming disturbance in nature, is just the 
reverse. When science is baffled, and law has 
ceased to soothe, and sequences seem broken, then 
it is that we are ready to cry out, " the finger of 
God," and to say with the ingenuous Peter : " Go 
away from us, O Lord, for we are sinful men." 

And yet with all the moral dread, there is to the 
human mind a strange fascination in this idea of 
the supernatural. We cannot let it go. 

Startling as is the thought of a personal God, 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. 69 

when it comes nigh to us, there are times when it 
is more tolerable to the thoughtful mind, even 
when not religious, than the iron-bound fixedness 
of an eternal, never -interrupted, never -to -be 
interrupted chain of physical sequences : A nature 
without beginning as it is without end, a fearful 
" perpetual motion," a horrible machine, such as 
Strauss describes, an everlasting syntagma, mind- 
less, idealess, caring nothing for us, ever grind- 
ing on with its merciless laws — cause and effect 
— cause and effect, for ever evermore — suggest- 
ing nothing else than an eternal flow of se- 
quences, in which we ourselves are indissolubly 
bound, with no hope of any existence ever rising 
above nature, or ever capable of drifting out of 
its right onward currents, or its circling vortexes. 
The thought is suffocating. Whatever may be 
the dread of religion in some of its aspects, we 
may well fly to it as a refuge from this stifling 
horror. Even superstition may be rationally wel- 
comed as some relief from such a nightmare of 
the soul. It is in such an appeal to the deeper 
human consciousness we find a reply to both 
classes referred to — those who would represent a 
belief in the supernatural as simply alien and in- 
credible, and those who go a step beyond, main- 
taining that the very idea involves an impossi- 
bility. 



JO VEDDER LECTURES. 

In regard to the first, a distinction should be 
made between two kinds of incredibility — that of 
the sense, and that of the reason. The first re- 
solves itself into mere strangeness of event. 
There is no reason why it might not be, except 
that we have never seen it, and that stands to us 
in place of a reason. It need not be said how 
many events and phenomena, indubitable parts 
of nature as now known, would have to be re- 
jected, if this mode of reasoning were strictly 
carried out by those who had never seen such 
phenomena, or to whose observations of nature 
they seemed to be in opposition. This has been 
much insisted upon by the opposers of Hume 
and the infidels of the eighteenth century. It is 
simply presented here as an illustration of that 
lower form of incredibility which I have styled the 
incredibility of the sense. Due weight is indeed 
to be given to it in argument. It justly demands 
unusual evidence for unusual events, whether 
alleged to be natural or supernatural — in some 
cases the very naturalness itself being prima 
facie more wonderful, that is, more incredible, 
than a supernatural causation. A strong reason, 
moral, spiritual, metaphysical, aesthetical even, 
may make the quiescence of nature, in a given 
case, more strange, that is, more incredible than 
its disturbance. The positive school, as it is 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. yi 

called, makes sense the only arbiter, and with 
them perhaps, there is, in this matter, no further 
reasoning. They have settled it that there are 
no supersensual ideas, no intuitions, no aspira- 
tions — in a word, no supersensual world of being 
controlling all below, and for which all below 
has its existence. All such ideas are themselves 
supernatural, and therefore, in their view, in- 
credible. For those, however, who believe in 
them, these higher faculties of the soul must be 
regarded as having also their claim to be heard. 
Viewed as separate from sense, or considered on 
a scale of higher probabilities, they, too, have an 
intrinsic reasonableness, demanding, in a given 
case, the strongest evidence on the other side, or 
against the happening of what they may seem to 
require, even though involving a disturbance of 
the usual sequence of events. 

And this is what we mean by the credibility or 
incredibility of the reason. It is that view, or 
those considerations which, aside from any 
strangeness of the sense, would warrant us in 
pronouncing an alleged event, whether of an 
ordinary or extraordinary kind, rational and 
therefore credible. It is not an assuming of its 
reality, but only of such a connection with a 
higher state of things perfectly rational and con- 
ceivable, as might change the scale and prepon- 



72 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



derance of evidence as addressed to the sense- 
transcending faculties. Take the vivid gospel 
narrative of the crucifixion. Keep the mind 
fixed upon the central fact as presenting the, 
essential idea. A holy man — the holiest man 
ever known on this sin-polluted earth — suspended 
on the cross. By wicked hands is He taken, 
crucified, and slain. He is enduring inconceiv- 
able agony. His malignant murderers are feast- 
ing their eyes upon the spectacle. They taunt 
Him with His helplessness, saying : " Come down 
now from the cross, if Thou be indeed the Christ, 
the Son of God." It is a challenge to the Eternal 
Father. It is a charging Him with indifference 
towards the holy sufferer. In bitter mockery 
they give him vinegar to drink, mingled with 
gall. His dying thirst unquenched, He utters a 
mighty wailing cry of desolation, and gives up 
the ghost. Now connect this awful scene with 
the perfectly rational conception of a Holy One in 
the heavens — One who loves righteousness and 
hates wrong with a divine intensity — One who 
possesses almighty power and infinite goodness. 
He is beholding this demonic spectacle ; it lies 
right beneath His holy eye. Nature is under 
His control, as it is, though in a far less degree, 
under the supernatural control of man. Now we 
cannot say that He will certainly interfere with 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. 73 

it; we may not deny His existence, or doubt His 
power, or charge Him with indifference, if He 
does not supernaturally interfere with it. He 
may even have great moral or nature-transcend- 
ing purposes that may prevent His interfering 
with it, or making any special manifestation re- 
specting it. Good men have been put to death 
most unjustly ; they have died in agonies of 
flame and crucifixion ; they have suffered, and 
nature has been silent ; no sign has come from the 
superhuman or supernatural sphere. So there 
may be reasons why God should not interfere 
with it in this case, or even give any sign of His 
beholding or His displeasure. It is, therefore, 
not incredible that the sun should shine calmly 
in the heavens, or go placidly down in presence 
of such a scene, or that nature should give no 
visible intimation of its sympathy, or of any sym- 
pathy on the part of Him who sits above. We 
may say, too, that should such sign be given, it 
would be strange to the sense, and, so far, have 
about it a sense-incredibility. But is there not 
a strangeness, an incredibility, in the other aspect, 
that may overpower this sense-incredibility, or 
become so strong, in a given case, as to make it 
more easy to believe that the rocks should be 
rent, that the earth should tremble, or that the 
sun should be darkened, than that nature and the 
4 



74 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



infinitely Holy One who sits above in the high 
and holy place, should manifest no sympathy, no 
sign even of His witnessing presence. It must 
he a moral reason in either case, whether for the 
wondrous appearing, or for what may be the still 
more wondrous withholding. The appeal is 
made to a higher faculty than the sense. There 
may be answers to it ; but surely these higher 
powers, the reason, the conscience — in a word, 
the consideration of a sphere of being above the 
physical, should have their weight in judging of 
the question, and the w T hole measure of credi- 
bility. It is the exceeding greatness of the moral 
reason connected with the alleged event which 
may be regarded as affecting the scale, so as to 
make it easy of belief to the mind deeply im- 
pressed with it. In other words, for souls acces- 
sible to this higher evidence, the moral strange- 
ness in the one aspect might more than balance 
the physical strangeness so much insisted on in 
the other and narrower view. 

A moral reason, or an impressive moral fact, 
joined w T ith an alleged miraculous or supernatu- 
ral event; every thinking mind must see that this 
being the case or not, must have an important 
bearing on the question of credibility. It is here 
we find the striking difference between the Bible 
marvelous and the Bible supernatural, and that 






THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 75 

of all other religions and mythologies with which 
some are so fond of comparing it. There is a 
moral sublimity about it found nowhere else, and 
which gross ignorance alone, or still more gross 
unfairness, can refuse to acknowledge. Compare 
the Bible myths, if any insist upon so calling 
them, with Greek m} T ths, or Hindoo myths, or 
Scandinavian myths, or any wonders fancied or 
deciphered from Egyptian or Assyrian monu- 
ments. The literary men among us who have so 
much to say about the Vedas, and the Shastras, 
and the primitive fire-worship, and the "tracing 
to these sources of all Christian theology," and 
of all scriptural mythology — let them bring on 
their authorities. If their ignorance of the Vedas, 
and of the Eastern Scriptures, is not greater than 
their ignorance of the Bible, let them cite book, 
chapter, section, verse, and lay them side by side 
with the Old and New Testaments. ' Or let them 
bring the best things their knowledge, their taste, 
their criticism, or their philosophy can select 
from these vaunted sources, and then let the 
Christian — even the unlearned Christian — con- 
front them, singly or collectively, with spiritual 
gems, and spiritual wonders, gathered from our 
holy book. Nothing could be more decisive ; 
nothing would so effectually put an end to this 
shallow literary babble now breeding so much 



j6 VEDDER LECTURES. 

ignorant scepticism; nothing would so thoroughly 
dissipate the foolish prating about Christ and 
Confucius, Christ and Buddha, which is now kept 
up by our wise lecturers, and on the slightest 
connections, whether it be the discovery of a 
Babylonian tablet with its monstrous imagery, 
and still more monstrous record, if rightly de- 
ciphered, or the finding of a fire-hook dug up 
from the site of ancient Troy. Especially may 
such a challenge be made in respect to the Bible 
supernatural as compared with that which is 
found in the mythological writings, hymns, or 
traditions of all other nations. If anything can 
be called universal, innate, common to all relig- 
ious and even to all serious human thought, it 
is this tendency to the reception of the super- 
natural. The inference from it is a most impor- 
tant one, and we commend it to those who have 
so much to say about the natural and the univer- 
sal religion. But it is this striking difference be- 
tween the Bible supernatural and all other won- 
ders to which special attention is here asked. 
Note the monstrosity, the grotesqueness, the sheer 
fancifulness, the absence of satisfying moral rea- 
sons, that everywhere characterize the heatHen 
mythologies. It is not only that moral reasons 
are absent, but that there is in them, for the most 
part, no reason at all. It is this more than any- 






THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 77 

thing else that constitutes their incredibility. 
How different the Bible marvelous ! The moral 
is everywhere, not only present, but predomi- 
nant. This so takes possession of the mind that 
the physical strangeness falls in the background, 
if it does not wholly disappear. Hence it is that 
the Bible supernatural comes to seem natural, if 
we may express it thus paradoxically. It is a 
nodus vindice dignus. It seems just the right 
thing, the fit and proper thing, the thing to be 
expected, the thing whose absence, it might 
almost be said, would seem stran s e in the midst 
of such sublime moral accompaniments. It is 
an ignorant slander, as uttered by some of our 
literary men, that the Christian reads his Bible 
with the same unreasoning confidence in its 
wonders as the Hindoo feels in the perusal of his 
sacred books, or in reciting his traditional 
legends. They know nothing about the Bible 
who say this, as indeed they know very little 
about the writings with which they so flippantly 
compare it. Crude monstrosities, unmeaning 
transformations, grotesque developments, hideous 
physical generations, which some take great pains 
to call incarnations in order to cast dishonor 
upon the Scripture doctrine of the Logos — grossly 
animal metamorphoses, all taking place without 
any moral reason, without any reason at all, 



78 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



without even any known physical analogy, are 
thus unblushingly compared with the Christian 
and Biblical marvelous, in which the very impres- 
sion of the miraculous disappears before the 
moral and spiritual awe. This explains why 
these Bible wonders, when read by the most in- 
tellectual and cultured minds — equal in this 
respect to the highest of those who make the 
charge — carry with them such a marvelous air of 
truthfulness, such a serene and majestic impres- 
sion of reality. It is this state of soul, and the 
discernment of this peculiar character in the 
Holy Scripture, that makes the wide differ- 
ence between men like Augustine, Anselm, 
Hooker, Bacon, Cudworth, Edwards, Hall, Cole- 
ridge, Foster, Neander, Maurice, Newman, Isaac 
Taylor, Montalambert, Guizot, on the one side, 
and the admired writers in some of our monthlies 
on the other. Certainly the men I have men- 
tioned, with all the hindrances of their age that 
may be conceded in respect to some of them, 
were as well qualified to discern the monstrous, 
the legendary, the absurd, as Mr. Emerson, or 
Mr. Oliver Wendell Homes, or Mr. Bayard 
Taylor, with all the reputation for genius and 
talent which is conceded to them. 

As an evidence of this divine impress upon 
the supernatural of the Scriptures, take the ac- 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. yg 

count of Moses' vision of the burning bush, as 
given in Exodus iii. How destitute of all the 
higher moral emotional must be the soul that can 
read it without a feeling of its calm, unutterable 
sublimity ! How does every Greek legend pale 
before it in this aspect of scenic power, even if 
we take nothing else into the account. Brief as 
it is, what other myth, so called, can compare 
with it in its awful, graphic vividness. And } T et 
what an absence of the mere wonder-making, or 
the sensational in style ! But this is only the 
outward accompaniment. It is the moral idea, 
the moral reason — that which other legends so 
much lack, unless as invented for them by un- 
natural or far-fetched accommodation — which 
gives it its ineffable sanctity and power. The 
very simplicity of the narration is the strongest 
evidence of its truthfulness ; the sensational 
is hushed, the awe upon the soul is too 
great for any mere emotional utterance. 4 ' And 
Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this 
great sight :" the flaming bush alone in the weird 
desert — steadily " burning, but not consumed." 
There is the moral here, the moral sublime tran- 
scending the physical sublime, the moral awe 
transcending the physical wonder, and making it 
seem like nature itself attesting the presence of 
its Lord. It has this moral power as the symbol 



80 VEDDER LECTURES. 

of " the ever-living God," as connected with the 
great name of Jehovah which some have sought 
so ineffectually, yet with such strange zeal, to bring 
out of the Egyptian darkness, or to deduce its 
high spiritual significance from the most un- 
spiritual of all the ancient mythologies. It is the 
proclamation of the eternal self-existence, the I 
AM, the timeless being, 6 &v, na\ b tjv, koI b epxofie- 
vog, who is, and was, and is to come. " Burning 
ever, but not consumed ;" what a power in this 
language of symbol, as proved by the inadequacy 
of other language, written or articulate, to ex- 
press by any one of its imperfect tense forms, or 
by aJl of them conjoined, this timeless idea ! 
Another example of this peculiarity is presented 
to us in the thunders of Sinai, the flaming mount, 
the appalling darkness into which Moses ascends, 
the awful voice, at which "the people trembled," 
and a removed afar off," and " entreated that the 
word should not be spoken to them any more." 
How life-like, and yet how ineffably sublime ! 
How much there was hereof the strictly natural, 
the volcanic, or the electric, we may not know, nor 
does it much concern us to inquire. The Scrip- 
ture makes little of the distinction on which the 
modern mind so much insists. It blends the 
great and the terrible of both departments in its 
representations of the power and presence of 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 8 1 

God. But here conies in again the moral great- 
ness of the scene. It is something beyond, either 
the natural, or the supernatural regarded merely 
in its effect upon the physical world. It is the 
spiritual sublimity we recognize in the reason of 
the event as transcending both. It is the occa- 
sion of giving a law to a people chosen from 
among the nations then fast sinking into polythe- 
ism and idolatry — chosen and preserved as a 
world-people, the world prophets, the keepers of 
truth, and of the glorious Messianic promise in 
which " all the families of the earth should be 
blessed " — in which we are blessed — from whom 
has come an influence beyond all the power of 
Greek and Roman literature, and by which our 
modern world has been so greatly elevated and 
transformed. It is this which makes it seem easy 
to us — rational, credible, most appropriate, most 
harmonious, when we read the moral message of 
which this superhuman scenery was the ac- 
companiment : " And God spake all these words 
saying, I am Jehovah thy God. Thou shalt 
have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not 
make to thee any image or any likeness of any- 
thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the 
earth beneath, or that is in the waters below the 
earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to 
them ; for I, Jehovah thy God, am a jealous God 
4* ' 



82 VEDDER LECTURES. 

— a holy God — visiting iniquity unto the third 
and fourth generations of them that hate me, and 
showing mercy unto thousands of them that love 
me and keep my Commandments." It is to this 
moral sublime that Moses appeals, Dent. iv. : 
" For what nation is so great, that hath God so 
nigh unto them ; and what nation is so dis- 
tinguished that hath statutes and judgments so 
righteous. Keep in mind the day that thou 
stoodest before the Lord thy God in Horeb, and 
ye came near and stood under the mountain, and 
the mountain burned with fire unto the very 
heart of the heavens, with clouds, also, and thick 
darkness, and the Lord spake unto you out of 
the fire; ye heard a voice, but saw no similitude. 
Take ye, therefore, good heed unto yourselves, 
lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you the like- 
ness of any figure, male or female, or lest ye lift 
up your eyes unto heaven, and behold the moon 
and the stars, even all the host of heaven, and be 
led to worship them — take good heed to your- 
selves, for ye saw no manner of similitude on the 
day when the Lord spake unto you in Horeb, 
out of the midst of the fire." Where did the 
legendary ever so combine the supernatural and 
the moral, the awful and the familiar? When 
did a Greek myth-maker, or myth-collector, when 
did a Greek lawgiver make such an appeal to a 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 83 

people, citing the most wonderful event in their 
history as a well known statistical fact entering 
so deeply into their moral and religious con- 
sciousness ? And where, too, it may well be ask- 
ed, could be found the moral ground of such a con- 
sciousness in any of their cotemporary surround- 
ings, if it had not come from some such stupend- 
ous revelation ? 

The Mosaic conception of Deity, the idea of 
the timeless I AM, of the God who has no sim- 
ilitude in heaven or earth, this from the Egyp- 
tians ! A thought so ineffably pure and holy 
plagiarized from a people whose imagery buries 
out of sight every moral or spiritual conception 
the most Bible-hating imagination could possibly 
trace in their sensual nature-worship, and their 
degraded animal forms. Let the rationalist, so 
called, believe this, if he can. 

Or come we down to the New Testament 
marvelous ; take the narrative the most as- 
tounding, the most legendary in its outer aspect 
of them all — the guiding star of the Wise Men, 
as Dr. Upham has so powerfully presented 
it in his wonderful book — alons: with it the 
Song of the Angels, the light that shone so 
suddenly around the adoring shepherds, the 
choral anthem that seemed to come from " the 
heavenly places : " Gloria in excels is — "Glory to 



84 VEDDER LECTURES. 

God in the highest ; on earth peace, good-will 
to men." As the marvelous merely, as the 
rapt ideal, how transcendingly sublime ! Where 
do we find anything like it in other legendary 
lore? How would it strike us, even in this 
aspect, if it had come upon us in the reading of 
any Greek or Hindoo myth, in some legend of Jupi- 
ter, Hercules, Brahma, Vishnu, Thor, or Woden ? 
But now look at it in connection with that still 
more glorious moral conception which it attests. 
View it as bearing witness to the incarnation of 
the Logos, that most wondrous fact in the evo- 
lutions of the world — that most wondrous event, 
as then manifested in the developments of human 
history. It is the birth of the Redeemer, the 
hero of the Protevangel, the mighty cham- 
pion against the powers of evil, the glorious 
Messiah, then humanly born in Bethlehem, 
''least of the cities of Judah," (as earth is least, 
it may be, among the planetary worlds,) but 
of whose spiritual and moral kingdom there was 
to be no end. Is it incredible, viewed in itself, 
that to such a fact, such an ideal even, there 
should be an attestation drawn from a higher 
sphere — if it is not irrational to believe in such 
higher sphere — and giving a reason and a meaning 
to the physical wonder itself? G.loria in excelsis. 
" Glory to God in the highest ; on earth peace, 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. 85 

good-will to men." This unreal ! what, then, is 
real ? This to be thrown away as belonging to 
the world of dreams, and the puzzling material 
shadows that come and go, appear and disap- 
pear, upon this low stage of being — Strauss, 
Renan, Hume, Voltaire, Tyndall, Darwin, Hux- 
ley, apes, gorillas — all these having a veritable 
place in rerum natura ! " Glory to God in the 
highest ; on earth peace, good-will to men ; " 
such a song from the supernal sphere falling 
upon the human sense ; it cannot be, says the 
sceptic, it cannot be, for it was never heard 
before, it has not been heard since, and there- 
fore no evidence can prove it. But imagine 
now — and it is a perfectly rational exercise of 
this high faculty — imagine now a being who 
had never seen a world like this, so full of evil, 
physical evil, physical irregularity as it appears 
— so abounding in moral obliquity, in madness, 
crime, in all unreason, in all spritual deformity — 
could either sense or reason credit it ? 

The peculiarity to which attention is called 
appears throughout the Bible. In all its super- 
natural, this moral ground and moral reason 
may be distinctly seen. There is nothing in it 
capricious, reasonless, monstrous, or grotesque. 
Now, whatever may be the condition of other 
worlds, the one in which we live is certainly full of 



86 VEDDER LECTURES. 

moral disorder, and there would seem to be a 
propriety that the physical, in such a world, 
should present some reflection of the spiritual 
confusion. Given, then, the idea of a personal 
God, of a holy God, loving righteousness, and 
hating sin — a deity in whose eyes the physical is 
subordinate to the moral, and has its value only 
as a disciplinary and probationary aid to a higher 
spiritual excellence ; given this, which no one 
can caLl irrational, and we may boldly reverse 
the position which some so confidently as- 
sume. It would be the rarity of the super- 
natural that would be the real wonder. The utter 
silence of nature ; that would be the real miracle. 
Even in such a morally disordered world, regu- 
larity in physical phenomena would still have 
a ground in the reason ; it would be demanded 
for the ordinary government of rational action ; 
but the total absence of any sign from the higher 
sphere attesting the presence of the denied or 
the contemned lawgiver, that would be a thing 
most wonderful, most incredible. And to this 
corresponds the natural feeling of the human 
soul. Why has a belief in the supernatural, I 
ask again, been so universal? To fallen beings 
there is, indeed, a dread in the thought of a per- 
sonal intervening deity, but this is overpowered, 
at times, by the still more alarming thought 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. gf 

of there being nothing above us that concerns 
itself with the affairs of men. When crime un- 
punished fills the land, when cruelty, injustice, 
oppression, are everywhere triumphant; when 
the predominance of wealth and capital are 
crushing labor to the earth ; when the poor cry 
out, and our boasted science of political econ- 
omy, with all its vaunted remedial powers, is 
found an utter failure ; when ambition, with its 
mighty standing armies, is filling the earth with 
groans and blood, and all the visible laws of 
nature seem pressed into the service of those 
who perpetrate such enormities ; when " men 
are made as the fishes of the sea, taken with the 
angle, caught in the net, gathered in the drag ; " 
when all mere humanitarian reforms have proved 
their falsity, or have exceeded in mischief the 
very evils they were proposed to remedy ; when 
the last great boast of democracy is showing" 
itself a failure, as well as the monarchies and 
aristocracies and priesthoods that preceded it ; 
when " earth seems given into the hands of the 
wicked " — how instinctively does the mind rise to 
something higher than nature ! " O that Thou 
wouldst rend the heavens and come down ; " the 
cry is in the soul, if not uttered by the voice, or 
its meaning distinctly conceived by the under- 
standing. Though we may not reason clearly 



88 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



about it, it is felt that it is the highest reason 
that prompts it. The politician, the editor, even 
the infidel statesman, seem sometimes strangely 
driven to the utterance of language that can have 
no other meaning. It is all inconsistent, indeed, 
hypocritical perhaps, in some of its aspects, but 
still in deference to this irrepressible feeling. 
There must be an interposition, somehow and 
somewhere, in favor of right. If questioned as to 
their distinct meaning in such utterances, they 
would doubtless have over again the old babble 
of intervention by social laws, or natural laws, as 
though nature herself were gentle, long-suffering, 
merciful, righteous, opposed to wrong ; but it is 
an intervention after all, something that would 
not happen in the course of things as they were 
going on, and the idea cannot stop short of the 
supernatural. The expectation is utterly rea- 
sonless, or it must be supposed that somewhere 
the switch is turned by an unseen hand ; at some 
link or nexus in the lower sphere of nature and 
humanity comes in the interference that receives 
its command from the higher order and the higher 
law. " I tremble for my country," says Jeffer- 
son, " when I remember that God is just and 
that His vengeance will not sleep for ever." 
However little he may have individually meant 
by this, it came from him impulsively as the 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. 89 

prophet of the human soul. Sometimes the re- 
verse thought sorely tries the believer's faith : 
" Art Thou not from everlasting Jehovah, my 
God, my Holy One ? Thou art of purer'eyes 
than to behold evil ; wherefore lookest Thou, 
then, upon them who deal treacherously, and 
holdest Thy peace when the wicked devoureth 
the man that is more righteous than he ? " Even 
to the Christian it is the rarity of the super- 
natural that seems the real paradox : " Why 
standest Thou afar off?" Why does not God 
oftener speak to us? Why are the heavens so 
still ? Instead of there being apparently so little 
of intervention in the affairs of men, why is 
there not a great deal more than has ever been 
recorded either in Scripture or in mythology ? 
The pious soul reconciles itself to it, but it is only 
on the ground of faith, rising above both sense 
and reason : " Clouds and darkness are round 
about Him, but judgment and truth are the foun- 
dation of His throne." 

But the most modern infidelity, as I have said, 
takes a step beyond this. The supernatural, it 
affirms, is not simply incredible, difficult of belief, 
requiring strong and rare evidence, but absolute- 
ly impossible. It would not be easy to say on 
what rational grounds this dictum rests. As 
commonly used, it is a sheer assumption. It has 



90 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



no reason in it. It is equivalent to denying that 
there is anything above nature, older than na- 
ture, or from which it comes. It has no reason, 
we say, for it is the annihilation of reason re- 
garded as anything else than itself a product of 
nature, as thought and consciousness are affirm- 
ed to be. Now reason, if there be any such 
thing, must be supreme. It must be primeval, 
first of all. " The Logos " must be " in the be- 
ginning " or it has no true existence. That to 
which we give the name of reason is, on the other 
hypothesis, but a shadow, a transient reflection 
from the physical, and can, therefore, never rise 
above it, or pronounce any judgment about it as 
rational or irrational. Whenever, therefore, any 
formal argument is attempted here, the assump- 
tion becomes immediately manifest in all its bald- 
ness. It comes to this : Nature is all ; there- 
fore there can be nothing else. Most lucid enthy- 
meme ! But that is all they can make of it. 
They avoid any objection drawn from the human 
faculties, by simply turning man himself into na- 
ture. By this arbitrary and impudent assump- 
tion, the human thought, consciousness, reason, 
immediately become products of nature, and 
even some divines, through a prejudice in favor of 
their own narrow definition of the supernatural, 
are forced to the same conclusion. Our souls are 






THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. g X 

in the machinery as much as our bones. The pas- 
sengers in the railroad train, with all their ideals, 
all their speculations, all their politics, morals, 
religions even, are as purely physical forces, 
physical movements, as the grass growing in *the 
fields by which they are so rapidly passing. The 
engineer is himself but apart of the machinery. 
Nay more, the very inventor of the engine, and 
even the invention itself, is as much an inseparable 
part of nature as the boiling water or the hissing 
steam. When we depart, however, in the least 
from this sheer petitio principii that yiature is all, 
we are at once in a region that carries our rea- 
soning fearfully far and fearfully high. If nature 
is not all, then it may be a small portion of the 
whole, and not only a small, but a very inferior 
thing, whose fixedness or mutability can have 
their value only in relation to some sphere or 
world above. In this crude assumption nature is 
not defined. If it is meant as only another name 
for being in general, or for the whole system of 
things including a supreme mind and a will as 
well as a supreme force, then it becomes a 
childish logomachy. It is the shallowest truism 
when we say that the laws of the cosmos, thus 
regarded, cannot be broken. It becomes simply 
a name for God's government, and all rational 
minds must assent to the proposition that in it 



92 VEDDER LECTURES. 

there can be nothing capricious, nothing without 
reason. " All things were made by the Logos, 
and without him was there nothing made that 
was made." If there is .any seeming deviation, 
any interruption of the course of the visible na- 
ture, it is in obedience to some higher law of the 
supernatural world. We may even suppose that 
such deviation from the ordinary visible is 
brought about by a transcending personality, 
acting directly upon, and through, deeply in- 
terior laws, or forces in nature herself — such 
springs or cogs as only operate, or approach, or 
come in contact, when the hour is struck, though 
lying long quiescent in the ordinary movement 
of the clock, or silently nearing each other in that 
far down region to which no science can pene- 
trate. The secret of such forces may be known 
to higher intelligences, whether God, or angels, 
or human beings supernaturally endowed with a 
deeper insight, and employing it, as ordinary 
men do in their ordinary interferences with the 
more superficial movements of nature, — turning it 
from what it would have done, or to what it 
would not have done, had it been left to itself. 
Some religious minds might, perhaps, be afraid 
of this, as confusing the distinction between the 
natural and the supernatural. But we need not 
concern ourselves about words here. It would 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. 



93 



still be miraculous, wonderful, full of awe. It 
would be all the same, so far as that moral 
power is concerned on which we have been in- 
sisting. It would be accompanied by the same 
fear of something- personal above or beyond na- 
ture. It might even be thought to carry with 
it a greater alarm, making nature itself a more 
fearful thing, as having, in its deep interior, 
hidden causalties unknown to our keenest 
science, yet furnishing a means of startling effi- 
ciencies to beings of a higher knowledge, or to 
forces connected with a higher human psy- 
chology. 

But there are other irrationalities resulting 
from the assumption that nature is all. The 
statement of them may not seem obvious, since 
the position assailed is of a kind so strange, so 
absurdly facile, that it would seem incapable of 
refutation as it is of defence. Let us take the in- 
fidel scientist's own view of it as an uninterrupted, 
or never interfered with, evolution, or coming out 
of things — ever coming out from that which is 
lowest in the remotest past, and to whose prim- 
eval emptiness nothing has ever really been 
added. Then, if nature is all, it is an eternal 
evolution, an eternal coming out, having no other 
end than such evolving. It is an eternal coming 
out that never, in fact, does come out, or that 



94 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



goes back as fast as it does come out. There is 
nothing finished in it, and there is excluded 
the thought of any perfect^ or reXetov, anything 
finished in any world above to which this eternal 
evolution is subservient. There are no such 
world, or worlds, above it, for which nature was 
made, or for the sake of which it is thus evolving, 
unwinding, until it is all spent, or, like some 
coiled spiral, winding back again to the starting- 
point, if starting-point is conceivable, and so on, 
and so on, evolutions of evolutions, for ever and 
for evermore. There are, strictly, no ends in the 
universe transcending the working of this purely 
physical machinery thus ever evolving for the 
sake of evolving* There are, then, no other ends, 



* A higher world than the physical necessary to explain the 
physical : This is the idea on which we so much insist, and it is 
gratifying to find it clearly and conclusively stated by so good 
an authority as the editor of "The Nation," No. 517 (May 17, 
J ^75)) P a g" e 367, where he says: "The affirmation that this 
physical world has also a moral meaning (that is, finds its end 
in a moral world above it), is one that no argument drawn 
from purely physical science can impugn." It is, however, 
but another mode of expressing a thought drawn from very 
ancient writings. Physical science, '' the science of change 
and motion?' as Aristotle defined it, cannot determine its own 
place ; it cannot say what may or what may not be above it 
in the immovable spheres. Therefore it is that this great 
thinker assigns to it a rank below the mathematical and the 
theological : ri fitknarov ; <j>vcjik?), 1u.a67jfj.aT tic?), Oeohoyuci? ; See the 
question briefly stated, Arist. Metaph. Lib. x. (xi.), ch. 7. 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPER.VA TURAL. g$ 

such as ends moral, artistic, ideal, ineffable. 
There are, in truth, no ends at all. There can be 
none ; for that which ever terminates in the pro- 
cess of its own evolution is no end ; and if there 
is no end, then no idea ; if no idea, then no law. 
Not only is there no Logos in the beginning, 
there is none that can ever be evolved. 

The incredibility of the supernatural, or, in 
other words, the just demand of strong evidence 
in particular cases, presents a fair ground of 
argument. That evidence, however, has been 
supplied. In regard to its weight there is mat- 
ter of controversy, but here believers have 
triumphantly met the infidel arguments in the 
old debates, and are prepared to meet them 
again. The field of conflict has in no respect 
changed. Such a fact as the Resurrection of 
Christ was not, indeed, to be lightly received ; 
but the proof demanded has been furnished, not 
only from the overwhelming cotemporaneous 
testimony of the most unimpeachable witnesses, 
sealed by lives of heroic endurance, and by 
deaths of cruel martyrdom, but from the standing 
spiritual miracle which it has wrought in the 
world — the supernatural, unearthly light that 
came forth from that sepulchre, and of which our 
own eyes and our own hearts are still witnesses. 
That controversy, we say, stands as it did before ; 



9 6 



VEDDER LECTURES. 






but here comes up a new form of denial, all the 
more stubborn and audacious in proportion to its 
utter want of rational ground. The Resurrec- 
tion of our Saviour never took place; no mirac- 
ulous event, as recorded in the Bible, ever had 
any objective reality. And why? Not simply 
on the ground of strangeness, or any measurable 
incredibility of sense, but because a miracle, a 
wonder in nature, any deviation from her ordi- 
nary visible course, and that, too, as falling under 
the exceedingly limited observation of our posi- 
tive philosopher, is absolutely impossible. This 
is the new position that now meets us every- 
where. It is coolly assumed by the scientist 
without the shadow of an argument. With still 
less of reason, if possible, it is echoed by many in 
the literary world. But most irrational of all is 
the use made of it by a certain class of Biblical 
critics. This sheer assumption they take as the 
ground of all their interpretations. For them it is 
enough to disprove the verit}^, or the authenticity, 
even, of any portion of the Bible, that there is in 
it any mention of a supernatural event, whatever 
the moral ground, or the accompanying moral 
reasons. Anything prophetic is at once set down 
as evidence of a later date, and rejected as a mat- 
ter of course. Here they take their stand with a 
stubbornness all the greater as it is opposed to the 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNATURAL. gj 

critical as well as to the moral reason. The super- 
natural is impossible, and, therefore, there need 
be no further argument about the passage. This 
is not the place for dwelling critically on such a 
position. It may only be said that it marks the 
inconsistency of a certain class of men who will 
not let the Scriptures alone, and yet deny the 
very characteristics that would chiefly seem to 
make them worthy of our study. It is a blind 
overlooking of the very elements in which they 
differ from all else called mythical or legendary. 
It is a denial of that patent moral character which 
is their standing peculiarity, and without which 
they sink below the rank of myths into sheer cir- 
cumstantial and statistical lying, a deliberate im- 
posture — a charge which, at this day, the wisest 
Rationalist shrinks from making against them. 
Such is the treatment they give to a book for 
which they profess a high respect, but which can- 
not be thus interpreted without violating their 
own famous canon in disregarding what is most 
characteristic of the Bible, and its high claim 
as a supernatural revelation. We cannot rightly 
interpret Homer without conceding to him a 
belief in his own mythology. But here is the 
difference between the Scriptures and all other 
narrations of the marvelous. Once concede a 
subjective truthfulness to the Biblical writers, 
5 



98 VEDDER LECTURES. 

and the objective verity of details thus given be- 
comes irresistible. The only alternative of escape 
from it is by taking the ground which very few- 
are now willing to take, that the Scriptures are 
designedly and statistically false ; in other words, 
the most circumstantial and studied imposition 
ever presented to the credulity of mankind. 

The main object in this lecture has been the 
consideration of two main infidel assumptions, 
the incredibility and the impossibility of the super- 
natural. The latter, it cannot be too often re- 
peated, is put forth without even the semblance 
of an argument, and yet with a confidence that 
could only be felt in a mathematical demonstra- 
tion. Nature is all. There are no other spheres 
of being, no ends transcending its endless and aim- 
less evolutions. Let the narrowness, as well as the 
audacity, of this assumption be duly considered, 
and the whole fabric of unbelief built upon it falls 
to the ground. It becomes a tohu and boku, empty, 
foundationless, formless, and void. The idea of 
possible spheres of being higher than nature, and 
for which nature itself is made, at once sweeps it 
all away. In the clear light of such a thought is 
seen the utter perversity, as well as narrowness, 
of the lower or solely physical view. " O we of 
little faith ! wherefore did we ever doubt ?" Such 
is the feeling when the mist clears up, and we 



THE DENIAL OF THE SUPERNA TURAL. gg 

get into a way of thinking so much purer and 
easier than the one that tortures the intellect as 
well as the affections. Depart from this, and 
there is no stopping-place short of the horrors of 
Strauss, with his dream of the iron wheels, that, 
in respect to gloomy grandeur, might almost 
seem to vie with the visions of Ezekiel or of 
Dante. On the other hand, begin with this, and 
all is clear. Nature has a meaning and a value. 
It becomes itself a higher department of the uni- 
verse just in proportion as it is raised to this 
higher office. It gets its true meaning when thus 
regarded as subservient to more glorious spheres 
of being partially revealed in the Scriptures, 
measurably thinkable by the human mind, and 
suggestive of still higher things that " eye hath 
not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man 
conceived." 



1 






LECTURE III. 

THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT — WORLDS IN SPACE. 



LECTURE III. 

THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT — WORLDS IN SPACE. 

Cosmical Argument ; Worlds in Space — Astronomical Objection — Its pres- 
sure — Trine aspect of the Universe — The believer charged with narrow 
conceptions — The three dimensions of being — The additions physical 
science has made to our knowledge, mainly mathematical — Question of 
planetary life still unsettled — Ancient ideas of cosmical immensity — Rela- 
tive distances — Emotional feeling of greatness not affected by number — 
Idea of law in the Scriptures, and as held by the most contemplative 
ancient minds — The stars as mighty beings — Modern conception that of 
endless repetition : less favorable to the unity of the cosmos than the 
ancient, though the latter was grounded on a more limited fact knowledge 
— Idea of great world times— How affected by modern science — St. Augus- 
tine — Reconciliations between science and the Bible — Their small value — 
No science in the Bible, a proof of a higher inspiration — Scientific preten- 
sions of other books called sacred — Grandeur of the Bible language — 
Heavens in the plural — Eternities in the plural — New knowledge as a 
ground of new interpretations — New Testament interpreting the Old — 
Mounting or germinant senses in distinction from double senses, or the 
cabalistical — Advance of physical knowledge may have a similar effect — 
New expansions of old ideas. 

The "astronomical objection" to Christianity, 
as it is most commonly called, is the one prob- 
ably that presses hardest upon the thoughtful 
mind. It addresses itself so powerfully to the 
imagination, and through it, at times, bewilders 
and amazes, if it does not wholly silence, that 
stronger faculty, the reason. It comes to us un- 
der two aspects, to which we may give the names 
of the stellar and the cosmical. The one con- 
founds us with the array of worlds supposed to 
be, like our earth, the abodes of life and ration- 

(103) 



I0 4 VEDDER LECTURES. 

ality, and, therefore, diminishing to a great, if 
not an infinite, degree, the importance which 
the Scriptures seem to attach to man. The 
other has more reference to the origin of the 
cosmos and its vast times, as supposed to be in- 
consistent with the scriptural account of crea- 
tion. The first dates mainly from the discoveries 
of the telescope. The other goes much farther 
back. Cosmical speculations about the origin 
of the world, the eternity of the world, its ma- 
terial and dynamical causalities, many of them 
strikingly similar to some that are now most rife, 
belong to ancient times — to very ancient times. 
Thoughtful men have been always thinking 
about these things. Even " the infinity ol 
worlds" was a very old speculation. We might 
call them the space and time aspects, and it was 
first thought best to present them in two sepa- 
rate lectures, with separate titles. The ideas, 
however, so intermingled themselves, that one 
general title seemed most appropriate, though 
regarded as embracing two principal divisions. 
The name " cosmical," then, may be taken as the 
common title to both lectures, or one more ap- 
plicable still may be found in an expression I 
have ventured to employ, though quite unusual. 
As extending beyond both space and time, and 
ascending to the still higher conception of rank 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. I0 5 

or order of being, permit me to call it the three- 
fold, Or TRINE ASPECT OF THE UNIVERSE,— a 
term to be more fully explained in its applica- 
tions. 

The believer in the Bible is charged with 
entertaining narrow views of the cosmos, or of 
the great whole of being. Science has intro- 
duced enlarged conceptions destructive of the old 
faith. It is no longer possible to believe as Bacon 
did. Even Newton can no more be cited, as 
formerly, in proof that one may hold to the Scrip- 
tures, and yet be a man of profound and elevated 
thought. But there are other aspects to such a 
charge, that might not only change, but invert its 
force. Of Newton it might be said that he, at 
least, lived at a time when astronomical science 
had furnished all the important materials for the 
boasting inference before alluded to. It may be 
safely affirmed, that, so far as concerns the ques- 
tion we are now contemplating, nothing that has 
since been discovered gives the most modern 
astronomer here any advantage over the devout 
Cacholic Copernicus, or the pious Protestants, 
Kepler, Euler, and Newton. Two more distant 
planets have been barely seen ; a swarm of 
worthless asteroids, and a few more of that still 
inexplicable class of bodies, the comets, have been 
added to the catalogues, but their bearing on 
S* 



I06 VEDDER LECTURES. 

the question is too small for computation. It 
could not have driven Newton from his faith in 
the Scriptures. The new light which burst upon 
the world through the telescope had been antici- 
pated by Kepler. To the others, whose names 
have been mentioned, it was clearly suggestive 
of every enlarged conclusion that has been, or is 
now, drawn from that discovery. 

Against such a charge we need not hesitate to 
use the shield of such authorities. But the ques- 
tion after all remains, On which side does the nar- 
rowness really exist ? Far be it from me to rail at 
science or scientific men ; but certainly there 
does sometimes reveal itself among the more 
boasting scientists an incapacity for moral and 
spiritual views that in their intrinsic grandeur, 
throw all physical discovery into the shade. In 
proof of such blindness, there might be cited this 
exceedingly narrow notion that nature is all, and 
that weak truism so confidently built upon it, 
that, therefore, there can be nothing which is not 
nature — that is, no supernatural. The charge 
against the religionist seems plausible. No other 
world in space than this little earth of ours ! 
What a paltry conception! But take now an- 
other view. Look away from this thinnest aspect 
of mere width, this outstretching space view with 
its possible, and, as many analogies would tend 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. j Q y 

to show, its probable sameness of conditions, as 
nascent, growing, decaying, progressive, retro- 
grading, — all alike essentially, as all springing 
from one mother nebula, one common causal 
development, unvaried, as they would have us 
believe, by causes or fiats of a higher order. Look 
above this mere physical plane of worlds beyond 
worlds, to what we have called the rank-aspect of 
worlds above worlds. The question then would 
stand thus : No other world or plane of being 
than the physical, ever returning into itself, and 
having no ends out of itself, no aims above itself; 
no other world, or worlds, than those we can 
survey with our telescopes, or peer into with our 
microscopes — no higher moral or spiritual sphere 
for which the physical exists, and without which 
it has no other than a physical value, that is, 
relatively no value at all! What an exceeding 
narrowness is here? The first is simply a defi- 
ciency of fact knowledge, and may, therefore, be 
enlarged ; the other blindness keeps the eye 
closed to all that light within which reveals to 
us the paltriness of the physical, even in its 
largest spatial and dynamical extent, when there 
is acknowledged nothing beyond and above it. 
It is thus that this doctrine, which makes nature 
all, so stultifies itself. Viewed from a higher 
point of contemplation, it shrinks to a narrow- 



108 VEDDER LECTURES. 

ness, a thinness rather, beyond anything that 
may be charged upon a limited space conception 
of the sense universe. The vast surface width 
that it gives the cosmos is all the more unmean- 
ing, all the more void of reason, from its want of 
depth and height. 

As the idea of geometrical magnitude de- 
mands for its perfection the three dimensions of 
length, breadth, and altitude, so the true con- 
ception of the universe does not become full and 
satisfying, until it assumes in our minds a trine 
aspect. Up and down are, indeed, relative terms, 
and so Solomon must have regarded them when 
he speaks of "the "heaven and the heaven of 
heavens." So all thinking men from Solomon to 
Aristotle and Newton, have ever regarded them. 
But the ideas they typify are real. It is felt that 
there must be, in the great system of things, a 
profundity corresponding to the altitude, an evil 
to the good, a darkness, too, a risk and a loss, 
forming a counterpart to the light, the hope, and 
the glory. The cosmical view must tend to this 
rounded completeness, unless some lower form 
of being obtains an interest, scientific or other- 
wise, that relatively obscures the higher. Thus 
it is very possible that the unscientific mind, or a 
thoughtful soul possessing a very limited sense 
knowledge, may have this trine conception more 



THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. i0 g 

perfectly developed, that is, in better propor- 
tions, than another far excelling in the amount of 
physical science, if such science confine the 
thoughts to one usurp ng nd absorbing view. 
These three aspects, then, may be tersely denoted 
as the cosmos in space, the cosmos in time, the 
cosmos, or the universe, in its unfolded and un- 
folding ranks of being, as ascending in their phys- 
ical, moral, spiritual, hyperphysical scales of 
gradation ; the first analogous to width or breadth, 
the second to length, the third to altitude, not in 
space- dimension, but in its ascent towards the 
loftiest aim of all cosmical existence. 

The physical in its space aspect is, indeed, the 
lowest of all, and yet it is the one out of which 
this charge of narrowness, as made against the 
Bible and the religious thinking, has most com- 
monly arisen. Since the invention of the tele- 
scope, worlds in space, or bodies in space, has 
been the challenging scientific wonder. It is 
this which has so greatly weakened, it is said, the 
old religious belief. It would not be easy to 
show, however, that even here it had the effect 
contended for, or that this " opening of the walls 
of the world," which the science of Lucretius 
boasted of as loudly as our own, extends greatly 
beyond what we may call the mere mathematical 
interest. What real ideas of life, and action, and 



HO VEDDER LECTURES. 

rationality, and varied orders of being, has it dis- 
closed to us ? In all these respects, in answer to 
all questions prompted by them, the heavens are 
as silent as of old. The earth is still the centre 
— the centre of human interest, if not of topical 
revolution. It is not intended to underrate the 
ideas thus gained, but they are far from being 
the greatest. The telescope has revealed to us — 
what? Distance, number, motion, dynamical 
relations. This, with' some few hints in respect 
to gases given to us by the spectrum, sums up 
about all the additions made to our knowledge 
since the days of Galileo. It has an interest in- 
deed, but of a narrow kind, of a lower rank as 
compared with those questions of destiny, and of 
the aim of God's eternal kingdom, for whose 
solution we are most anxious, and without which 
other knowledge is a tantalizing darkness, creat- 
ing at each step more mystery than it explains. 
Worlds have been discovered— so the term is 
now used as applied to stellar or planetary 
bodies ; but it is impossible to prove that these 
worlds, so called, are abodes of life, either in its 
higher or its lower forms. There are not a few 
indications to the contrary. There are appear- 
ances indicating that a good proportion of these 
cosmical bodies, whether stellar, planetary, or 
cometary, are mere wastes in respect to the 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 



Ill 






higher aspects of being. There is no certain 
knowledge, no probable knowledge of there being 
in many of them, or in any of them, the very first 
rudiments of vital organization, any more than in 
our earth during the millions of ages that geolo- 
gists assign to its primordial existence, whether 
gaseous, fluid, or solid. W he well sets this forth 
in a remark, whose force strikes us at once : " It 
is no more incredible," says he, "that there 
should be immense space without life in any of 
the bodies that occupy it, than that there should 
be an immense time during which one body that 
we "know was in the same azoic condition." 

The thoughtful ancient mind regarded the 
cosmical bodies as being at immense distances, 
and, therefore, of immense magnitudes, some of 
them, probably, larger than our earth. There is 
evidence that the mind went out freely in this 
expansive direction. The idea was not depend- 
ent on any reduction of these distances to deci- 
mal numbers, that, beyond a limit by no means 
great, have only a notional or mathematical in- 
terest. In regard to the conceptual greatness 
nothing is gained by them, since 10,000, or 
10,000,000, are equally beyond the conceptive 
power. Old thinkers, without this, talked even 
of " the infinity of worlds." With some it was 
a favorite speculation. "As well think of one 



112 VEDDER LECT RES. 

head of wheat in a boundless field," says Metro- 
dorus, " as of one world in infinite space." " The 
atria" says Plutarch, " the rational causalities, are 
infinite, and the effects must correspond ;" there 
was no reason for the one that would not prove 
the existence of the many. The ancient mind 
had quite a fair estimate, too, of the proportional 
distances of the planets, though they had no means 
of bringing them into earthly measurements of 
miles and inches as deduced from any known 
earthly parallax. The telescope has helped us 
here. More perfect instruments, and more perfect 
observations have given us earthly base lines, and 
we now say it is so many millions of miles, and 
these miles we can bring into feet, and, more 
wondrous still ! even into barleycorns ; but the 
essential knowledge, and the essential reasoning 
from distance, remain very much the same. The 
conceptual feeling of vastness is not increased by 
the notional estimate. By giving a dispropor- 
tioned prominence to the mathematical interest, 
it may be that the emotional has been actually 
diminished. According to the best evidence of 
antiquity, Pythagoras held the Copernican sys- 
tem, as it is now called, in its completeness, 
whilst Plato held it partially. Aristotle, in his book, 
" De Coelo," condemns it as built upon fanciful or 
a priori reasoning. It placed the sun in the cen- 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 



"3 



tre, he says, because the fire was the worthier, 
as it was the more ethereal or heavenly element. 
This was opposed to observation and sense induc- 
tion, on which he reasoned as the Bacon of his 
times. On the Pythagorean system, he maintained, 
there certainly ought to be an annual parallax of 
the fixed stars, or some of them. The absence 
of such parallax, therefore, showed the theory to 
be false, or else these distances were not merely 
great, very great, as he held them to be, but 
inconceivable, vast beyond any measure of com- 
putation. We are yet engaged in attempts at 
solving that problem. I may be permitted to 
refer to this here, as presenting a singular fact in 
the history of science and philosophy : The 
visionary view, the a priori view, as the Stagirite 
calls it, has led to truth, whilst the method of 
exact science — for Aristotle's argument is founded 
on legitimate sense induction — landed him and 
his followers, for many ages, into what is now 
known to be error. Sense, in its keener instru- 
mental forms, has come at last to support the 
visionary view. This theory of Pythagoras in 
respect to the solar system was connected with 
his other sublime doctrine of the universal har- 
mony, or as he preferred to style it, the music of 
the spheres. There was grandeur in this out- 
stretching idea, which the telescope is only par- 



ii4 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



tially verifying ; there was a sublime emotion in 
it, of more value than any science which lacks 
it, however exact it may claim to be. And so 
when David, surveying the nightly heavens, ex- 
claimed : " Lord, what is man? " Or when Isaiah 
said : " Lift up your eyes on high, and behold 
all these ; who bringeth out their host, who 
calleth them all by name ; it is because He is 
strong that not one of them faileth," — it is very 
possible that there may have been a spiritual 
interest far beyond 2J\y that La Place may have 
felt. To the latter, the heavens were simply 
his orrery, his diagram for the better exhibition 
of his mathematical analysis. It shocks all our 
better thinking to believe that this French 
atheist had a higher view of the universe, and 
of the power that rules it than these great re- 
ligious souls of antiquity, even with their lim- 
ited knowledge of distance and mathematical 
relation. 

And so, too, in regard to the idea of law, 
of which we boast as though it were a purely 
modern thought. They had the substantial knowl- 
edge, and that, too, in its purest form. They 
knew that there must be a cosmical law, even 
as the cosmos was one. The very name im- 
plies unity of organization, and this is the very 
essence of law. They believed that there was 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 



115 



an order in the heavens, in the universal sys- 
tem of thing's, long before epicycles, or vor- 
tices, or gravitation, or correlated forces had 
been ever heard of: " For ever, O Jehovah, Thy 
word is settled in the heights ; " " all things 
stand according to Thine ordinance." That 
there was such a law, a harmony, " making 
peace in God's high places," a unity in the uni- 
verse, whatever might be its space extent, this 
was deemed of higher and more religious value 
than any knowledge of its numerical details not 
inspired by this nobler conception. Whether 
its energy was inversely as the squares, or as 
the cubes of the distances, or what those dis- 
tances were in earthly measurements, — of all this 
they knew but little, even as we know but little 
more ; but they had a transcending knowledge, 
a far higher thought of it, when they recognized 
it as God's law, God's voice in nature, His Word 
first uttered in nature's origination, and still 
sounding on as the security for nature's contin- 
uance. Hence they gave it this name so pecu- 
liar to the Scritures, but having its shadow in 
the ancient Greek or Egyptian doctrine of the 
Logos. What many style law, using it as a 
wholly impersonal term, denoting no real causal 
power, but only a series of dead sequences, the 
Bible calls " The Word of God that runneth 



Il6 VEDDER LECTURES. 

very swiftly," pervading as well as sustaining all, 
and in wkick, as Paul affirms in his echo of this 
older doctrine (Coloss. i. 15,) ra rcdvra avveoTTjue, 
all things consist or stand together. It was but 
another echo of the old Shemitic thought when 
Socrates, following Pythagoras, calls it " the 
harmony that binds together all things in heaven 
and earth." " He maketh peace in His high 
places," concordiam in sublimibus suis. Cicero but 
catches the same idea when he says, orta simul 
est lex cum mente divina, which Hooker only 
translates in that much-lauded utterance of his : 
" Law has its seat in the bosom of God." Mod- 
ern thought has enlarged our conception of the 
universe, it is said ; but how is this done ? It is 
by making matter first, the nebula first, the 
lowest first, and law, love, and reason, all its 
junior products. Aristotle reverses this. To aaXov 
to dyadov, to votjtov, the Fair, the Good, the Idea, 
they are first ; they, through vovg, mind, or intel- 
ligence, move Love, as Love is the great mover 
of all : Kivet de (bg epufievov, " it moves it as being 
loved?' * This remarkable declaration, which 



* " He moves it as being loved." Cudworth following 
Proclus in his commentary, gives a wrong rendering of this, 
making it too imaginative, or Platonic, as some would call 
it. He refers the participle epu/uevov to Deity, or the mover, 
instead of the cosmos. It is the world, or the created " Soul 



THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. 



11/ 



might have been expected from the semi-poet- 
ical Plato, moves our wonder as proceeding- from 
this pure, unimaginative, passionless intellec- 
tuality. We find it in the xi. book, sec. 7 of 
his Metaphysica, or " Things above nature :'' Ktvel 
6e (bg epufievov. It is in his argument concerning 
the First Mover and the first moving things ; 
dry, some would call it, but having a beauty in 
its very terseness. Law is resolved into the 
higher idea of love : the world moves because it 
is loved of the First Mover. Its charm, as well 



of the world," he would represent as " enamoured with the 
Supreme Mind, and thus, in imitation of it, continually turn- 
ing round the heavens." It is the love of the cosmos, or 
its admiration of the " First Fair and First Good," or the 
world drawn rather than impelled. This is beautiful, but it 
is not the idea of the sober Aristotle. It is rather the love 
of the Mover towards tbe cosmos, or to its harmonious 
movement, which is the first moving power. Thus, "the 
Good " (the 'Ayadov) is higher in the eternal order of being 
than ~Sovc, or Intellect. In one sense it is the 'Ayadov, the 
Good that gives being to the intelligible ; or as the Sun in 
Plato's splendid comparison {Republic, vi. 58, E) " gives to 
things not only their visibility, but also their generation, so 
does that highest thing, the Good (in other places called 
love), not only cause the cognoscibility of things, but also 
their very ''essences and beings.'' {Intellectual System of 
the Universe, Chap, iv., Sec. xxiii.) When carefully studied, 
however, the ideas of Aristotle and Plato come to the same 
thing : the first moving dpxh is not merely something older 
than matter or force; it is Love, or u the Good," higher 
even than mind or idea. 



Il8 VEDDER LECTURES. 

as its power, is in its conciseness ; to opeferbv teal to 
voTjrbv klveI ov KivovfiEvov: " The desire and the 
thought, in other words, Love and Idea, must 
be the first movers, themselves the product of no 
preceding motion." Or according to another 
statement in the same chapter, mind, vovg, is the 
mover of the physical world ; but vovg may be 
said to be moved by votjtov, mens by intellectum, 
mind by truth. Here he stops, but the next step 
would have carried him to the " Principium," in 
whom mind and truth, ideal truth, eternal truth, 
which we cannot think of either as non-existent 
or as separate from a personal mind, are one and 
the same. This is the Primum Movens, the Logos 
that was with God and was God. But as it 
stands, Aristotle's argument is irrefragable : Love 
is the First Born in the eternal generation he 
describes. Love and Idea, the Good, and Mind 
eternally beholding it, are above all motion. 
They are causes, not effects. 

In another chapter (xiii. 4) he reasons, in a 
similar manner, against those old materialists 
who maintained that the most imperfect of all 
things was first, even as their modern brethren 
do in their nebular theory ; in other words, 
mindless matter first, — force, the force of noth- 
ing, first, — contingency first ; and then, as things 
went on (I am giving his very language in his 



THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. ng 

account of these old atheists) npoeXdovorjg rrjg r&v 
ovtcjv (f)vo£G)g, the good and fair, mind and idea, 
did somehow appear." He charges them with 
bringing more out of less, which is the same as 
something out of nothing, and compares them 
with the mythologizers who made Night and 
Erebus the source of all things, from whom are 
born both gods and men. 

But in regard to that lower conception, the 
space magnitude, or space relations, or dynamical 
importance of bodies in the universe, it is all idle 
to say that these old minds simply conceived of 
the stars as glow-worm points of light twink- 
ling uselessly in a solid firmament, or sky, just 
above their heads. Solomon's sublime prayer, 
" The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot con- 
tain thee, cannot bear thee," as the Hebrew ex- 
presses it, presents a conception transcending 
anything derived from the modern astronomy as 
given in our books. David's exclamation shows 
that he connected the heavenly bodies with ideas 
vastly transcending man's lowly earthly condi- 
tion. Without this the sublime rapture becomes 
inexplicable. Of the stars as bodies inhabited, 
just as our earth is inhabited, these old worship- 
ers may not have thought. Such an idea is, 
indeed, found in the Greek poetry, and it may or 
may not have been in the Hebrew mind. There 



120 VEDDER LECTURES. 

is no proof to the contrary, as there is no irra- 
tionality in the thought that it may have oc- 
curred to many a meditative soul in the earlier 
times. It is still but an imagination with us, and 
there was much to excite the same imagination 
even before science had got an earthly unit of 
measurement. There is other proof besides the 
writings of Aristotle that the ancient men, orien- 
tal and occidental, regarded the heavenly bodies 
as being of immense magnitude, and at incalcu- 
lable distances. This, however, is quite clear, 
that they connected with the stars most mighty 
and glorious existences. " One star differed from 
another star in glory," but each represented a 
transcending power in the kingdom of God. It 
was itself the outshining of an exalted being, or 
the abode of an exalted being ; and there is as 
much grandeur in that idea, giving as high a con- 
ception of the greatness of the universe as would 
come from the thought of a vast numerical popu- 
lation, whether of mollusks, mastodons, or giants. 
They were " the Hosts of Heaven," and hence that 
sublime epithet Jehovah Tsebaoth used in refer- 
ence to space and rank, as Melek Olamim. King of 
the Eternities, was employed to denote the time 
aspect of God's kingdom. These mighty stellar 
powers might have infinite diversity, spiritual as 
well as dynamic, whereas the modern idea seems 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 



121 



tending to an infinite sameness. Our space worlds 
are but endless repetitions. It is supposed, and 
that, too, by a fair analogy, that they grow 
as our earth has grown, and that vast numbers 
of them are now passing through the same' 
chaotic, life-lacking stages. Seldom do we meet 
with the thought, as expressed in the scientific 
world, that any of them have got above us. To 
science in general man is the etre supreme. 
Through him the world is just coming into con- 
sciousness. The same conclusions some are de- 
riving from the spectrum ; the same gases, the 
same elementary substances, lead to the idea 
of sameness in material organization, and this to 
that of sameness of life in its successive stages — 
like the earlier inhabitants of our earth as adapted 
to similar conditions. In this limited scientific 
space conception of being, repetition is a pre- 
dominant idea. It suggests a level plane with- 
out any towering superiorities, or it resolves 
itself into an endless succession of material tacts, 
forming a series having eventually no other vari- 
ations than those of space, numerical quantity, 
forces, motions, mathematically diversified posi- 
tions, and relations of atoms. In a word, motion 
and force, if the two ideas can be separated ; these 
are the only things, res, realities. If we want to 
get any other sounds from this flat, tuneless 



122 VEDDER LECTURES. 

homophony, we must look elsewhere. We must 
go to Scripture, or call in the aid of some higher 
ideas, the seeds of which we may find in our own 
souls. Science gives no evidence of spiritual 
dignities. With some it is even a boast that she 
does not find them. 

Which of these two views of the stellar inhabi- 
tation or domination is the true one need not be 
here inquired ; nor, should the inquiry be made, 
could science give us any answer. What has 
been said has reference only to this claim of 
grandeur and enlargement, or this common 
charge that the religious idea of the universe, as 
derived from the Scriptures, is a narrowing of 
the human mind. But more of this elsewhere. 

The second head of this trine division of the 
universe, or what I have called its time aspect, 
belongs, in the main, to another lecture ; but 
there are some suggestions in relation to it that 
connect themselves with the train of thought in 
which I have here indulged. There is a view of 
the Biblical creative chronology to which this 
charge of narrowness may be thought to have 
some application. It is that which regards not 
only the tellurian, but the whole cosmical evolu- 
tion, as the work of one week, or six solar days of 
our present reckoning, with an infinite blank 
preceding. A view very different from this, or 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. i 2 $ 

one that regarded the times as immeasurable, 
and even ineffable, was held by the best thought 
of the Church very long before geology as a 
science was ever heard of. The mediaeval doc- 
trine of the cosmos was, in truth, a narrowing 
from the wider science of the classical world, and 
from the largeness, moreover, and freedom of 
earlier patristic interpretations of the Bible. 
Geographical knowledge, too, had actually sunk 
within smaller limits, and the discoverer of 
America but revived cosmical and tellurian ideas 
which were familiar to some of the freer and 
bolder thinkers of antiquity, such as Pythagoras, 
Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, and Pliny. Dur- 
ing these mediaeval times there had come in more 
of the thaumaturgic spirit, and the mechanical 
idea of creation, instantaneously, or almost in- 
stantaneously, out of nothing — not only as 
respects the primal force or matter, but the 
separate parts and products of the great struc- 
ture — became a favorite one. It may be said, 
too, that it was more taken up with the theolog- 
ical fact of creation than with the manner or 
idea. God made the world ; in a religious point 
of view that was all they sought or cared to 
know. The divine power, the divine command, 
the idea of instantaneousness, or of very brief ti mes, 
were dwelt upon as having more of this wonder- 



124 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



working aspect, which the spirit of the times re- 
garded as more closely allied to the religious 
feeling. This blinded the mind to those other 
time ideas of birth, growth, succession, evolution, 
bringing forth, one thing coming out of another, — 
in a word, of frninf"), " generations," natures, 
genesis, which to one who now reads the sublime 
Biblical account, under the influence of a dif- 
ferent thinking, appear so prominent that the 
wonder is they should have been so overlooked. 
Now there is no need of shrinking from the ad- 
mission that the change of the current thought 
in this respect may be attributed, in a good de- 
gree, to the influence of modern science ; though 
there never was a time when such an interpreta- 
tion as that of Saint Augustine would have been 
deemed heretical. He held it, and others held it 
in his day, as they have since, for an interpreta- 
tion having good exegetical grounds in the letter 
and spirit of the account. No science forced 
them to it. They found ample support for the 
idea of extraordinary times in the remarkable 
language of the Scriptures, and in the peculiar 
style they employ in setting forth the great facts, 
in themselves so ineffable, of origin and escha- 
tology. 

Revelation is sometimes degraded by attempts 
to which there is given the sounding name of 



THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. I2 - 

" reconciliations between religion and science." 
They are too apt to make science, or what as- 
sumes to be such, the constant, and the Bible the 
variable quantity in the equation. The Scrip- 
tures must conform, or they must be made to 
conform. It is not a work of fair exegesis, but of 
possible accommodation. It is enough, for ex- 
ample, that any utterly unproved hypothesis 
denies a distinct beginning of the human species, 
anything by way of organization or inspiration, 
anything in the physical, or the spiritual, con- 
stituting a specific difference, and making that to 
be homo which before was not homo. Such a 
sweeping conclusion in respect to divine possi- 
bilities is taken, at once, as "established science," 
and straightway some prepare themselves to 
meet the case by the theory of an ideal Adam. 
This will do, perhaps, until another demand is 
made in the name of science, and that is met in 
an equally prompt and easy way by the theory 
of an ideal Christ, an ideal incarnation. Scripture 
shakes hands with science. It is reconciled, as 
the saying is, and this feat is accomplished by 
going into the very interiora of the Christian 
creed, and making the Second Adam as unreal 
as the First. Thus we have our Bibles and 
science too. We can laud both on the same plat- 
form, and this is great gain. We say it boldly : 



126 VEDDER LECTURES. 

better reverentially bury the old book than 
treat it in this way. The boldest denial of infi- 
delity is not more insulting than such a defer- 
ential mockery. New facts, in seeming conflict, 
from well-ascertained history, or well-established 
science, may set us to re-examine former inter- 
pretations, or former applications of them ; but 
we must have an honest faith or none at all. A 
purely mythical view of the creative account is 
better than any scientific forcing it will not 
bear. 

There is no science in the Bible, either in its 
language, its style, or its assumed teaching. At- 
tempts to find it in the artless subjectiveness of 
its truthful holy writers only leads to delusion. 
The language of these seers of ineffable things is 
grounded on their modes of conceiving ; their 
conceptions are shaped by the knowledge of their 
day. It is their true inspiration that takes this 
language, and these conceptions, as the best 
representatives of facts and ideas lying back of all, 
and which the dialect of science and philosophy 
fails to reach as much as the vulgar thinking. In 
truth, nothing shows more strongly the fact of 
some, divine supervision of the Bible, than the 
absence of any such scientific or philosophic 
language, or of a style assuming to be that of 
any special thinking, or of anything esoteric, 



THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. I2 7 

such as has characterized those who have as- 
sumed to be religious teachers in all ages. This 
is wholly lacking even in cases where there 
would seem to have been the strongest tempta- 
tion to such a mode of speech. A divine wis- 
dom is here. The scientific or philosophic 
language of one age is different from that of 
another. No scientist would dare to say that 
our own had reached a finality. It may appear 
even childish a thousand years hence. Now 
something has kept the Scriptural writers from 
thus compromising the wondrous book of which, 
through the ages, they have been the human 
media of transmission. 

In its account of the ineffable truths of origin, 
the language of the Bible is optical, phenome- 
nal, the vehicle of first appearances. It is a 
universal language addressed to the most un- 
changing of the human faculties. Its outside 
symbols, the same for all ages, represent the 
ineffable facts, the interior causalities, the ulti- 
mate causalities, that lie behind the phenomenal 
at whatever distance. The speech of science 
can do no more. It sounds out a mile or two 
farther from the shore of the directly seen. It 
brings out a few more interior appearances, but 
they are still appearances, (paivdfieva, having ever 
some things yet more interior of which they are 



128 VEDDER LECTURES. 

appearances. The difference is that the Scrip- 
tures, in such cases, take the first phenomena, 
the most visible outward of " the things seen," 
as the immediate representatives of the deep un- 
seen, whether near, or far off, or even infinitely 
remote. It names them from such unchanging 
outlying appearances. Thus there is no pre- 
tense of being near the mysterious ultimate 
causation — such a pretense as science sometimes 
makes, though still " far wide," still holding on 
to something they call a cause, but which the 
next increase of the magnifying power turns 
again into a phenomenon — an appearance of some- 
thing farther back, and still farther back, that 
appears through it. Thus do they ever verify 
the deep idea of inspiration, that " the things 
which are seen are made from things unseen," 
from causalities that lie, and must for ever lie, 
beyond the reach of sense, or any science 
founded on sense. From this never-finished 
process of turning supposed causalities into 
new appearances, the dialect of science must be 
ever becoming obsolete. But the Scripture 
never commits itself to any mode of speech that 
must change with changing knowledge of these 
nearer phenomena ; and this is a striking dif- 
ference between the Bible and other books 
called sacred. The Koran fails here. It evi 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. I2 q. 

dently affects sometimes a scientific language, 
or supposed to be such ; as when Mohammed, 
or his commentators, give the exact number of 
the heavens, and even the distances, in miles, be- 
tween them. Something of the same kind may be 
traced in the oldest books of all other religions, 
such as the Hindoo, the Persian, and the Chinese. 
There are appearances of attempts, however 
crude, at something like scientific theory — feeble 
efforts at a sort of philosophising, or the utter- 
ance of something seemingly above the common 
mind, an assumption of some esoteric wisdom, 
or a pretentious teaching style as of persons ini- 
tiated into mysteries above the ordinary intelli- 
gence. There is nothing like this in the Bible. 
In that book all human thought is put upon a 
level. From beginning to end, the Scriptures 
go on their majestic way, manifesting every- 
where this strange unconsciousness. There is 
nothing of the thaumaturgic, or the wonder- 
making, even when narrating the greatest won- 
ders. When telling of God's descent in the 
awful flames of Sinai, or of the song of the 
angels at the Redeemer's birth, they are as calm 
and unpretending as when narrating the pastoral 
life of Jacob, or the friendship of David and 
Jonathan. The Bible never calls attention to the 
grand things it is saying, or going to say. There 
6* 



130 VEDDER LECTURES. 

is, m style, nothing legendary or sensational 
about it. It nowhere stops, or stoops, to remove 
objections ; it never betrays any anticipation of 
cavils. Its perfect subjective truthfulness ; when 
this is understood, the right-minded reader finds 
it so difficult to resist the evidence of its ob- 
jective credibility. So honest, so pure, so true 
within, it cannot be false without. 

Thus the Bible never commits itself to any 
compromising language. It speaks of the heav- 
ens in the plural, as it does of eternities in the 
plural ; but it does not number them as the Mo- 
hammedans and some of the Jewish Rabbins and 
Talmudists have done. It speaks of the third 
heavens, indeed, but only as the symbol of the 
ineffable space-transcending glory. It has its 
" heaven of heavens/' like its olam of olams, 
or world of worlds, its all-comprehending 
sphere, its all-containing time. It leaves these as 
ever expanding ideas, capable of holding any 
conceptional content that any science may ever 
put into them. We may attempt to make it 
more scientific by describing these plural heav- 
ens as atmospherical, astronomical, planetary, 
stellar, nebular, but all this never exhausts the 
Scriptural language. It takes in something be- 
yond all physical worlds which, in their widest ex- 
tent, are but the lowest spheres in the kingdom of 



THE CO S MIC A L ARGUMENT. 



131 



God. It carries the mind to that transcending 
ovpavbg to which " Christ lifted up His eyes " 
when He said : "And now, Father, glorify thou 
Me with the glory which I had with Thee before 
the world was," npb rov rbv fcoa/iov elvac. The Bible 
language is not to be limited by the conceptual 
faculty, whether that of Solomon or of Herschell. 
It points to the glory which is above the heavens, 
over the heavens, super coelos. It goes up, up, to 
the throne of God, the eternal seat of the highest 
power and the highest intelligence, wherever 
that may be, or in whatever space relations, 
whether conceived as central, altitudinous, pro- 
found, or all-present. " He looketh down to 
behold the things that are in the heavens, as well 
as the things that be on the earth." It is a locus 
all-transcending ; it is a language all-satisfying, 
intelligently guiding the common religious mind, 
whilst giving a view, if we choose to take 
it, inexhaustible by science or any amount 
of inductive knowledge. The Bible state- 
ments of origin, its view of the universe in its 
relation to God — the only view of any spiritual 
value — so transcends all sense-knowledge that it 
can never truly come in collision with it, or re- 
quire reconciliation. 

And yet, in saying this, there is not excluded 
a proper deference to science as suggestive of 



132 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



something in these ever-mounting senses that 
certain preconceived limitations may have kept 
us from seeing. We apply this principle of new 
knowledge expanding, though not contradict- 
ing, old language, and we find no difficulty in it 
when we interpret the earlier Scriptures from 
the standpoint of a higher theological knowl- 
edge derived from the later revelations. Christ 
and Paul give us a better understanding of 
Moses and the Prophets. The mind receives an 
enlargement from the New Testament writings, 
and we legitimately carry this back to the better 
interpretation of the Old, discovering thereby 
" wondrous things out of God's ancient Law." 
The Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Prophets, yea 
the history, the genealogy, and the chronology of 
the Old Testament seem to carry a higher sense. 
Its devotional assumes a more heavenly, its 
ethics a more spiritual aspect. That higher 
sense was, seminally, there before, and some 
minds of unwonted spirituality had, even then, a 
glimpse of it. It is not a mere kabala, accommo- 
dation, or type even. It is not a double sense, 
or a mere arbitrary mystical sense. It is a mount- 
ing sense, a germinant sense, built firmly, indeed, 
upon the letter, and rising legitimately from it, 
but now satisfying, or tending to satisfy, that 
glow, and warmth, and elevation of diction 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT 



33 



which before seemed so strange in its connection 
with facts of a seemingly lower order. David and 
Pindar both seem to be celebrating temporal vic- 
tories, temporal deliverances ; but what a dif- 
ference in their styles ! What a rising is there in 
the spiritual emotional as produced by the He- 
brew Psalms when we read them in the revealing 
light of David's greater Son, bringing out the 
rays that lay latent in the spectrum, or were, in 
comparison, but dimly seen. It is like the feel- 
ing with which the newly-converted soul takes 
up the whole volume of Scripture. What has 
changed ? The language is the same. The logic- 
al significance of words in their logical relations 
are the same ; but how sublimely have they risen 
in what may be called the scale of spiritual 
emotion ! Though lexically the same, what a 
glory seems now to invest certain oft-recurring 
words : God, life, salvation, righteousness, truth, 
mercy, holiness, forgiveness, the fear of the Lord, 
the kingdom and people of the Most High, the 
Anointed One of whom such glories are pre- 
dicted, but which so shrink when applied to an 
earthly monarch, or an earthly salvation. "Jeho- 
vah reigns, let earth rejoice." Had we ever read 
that before ? But there they stand, the same 
words as of old before the Psalms became the 
undying liturgy of the church; but how have 






134 VEDDER LECTURES. 

they all ascended, not to a different exegetical 
defining, but to a higher plane of significance. 
The temporal salvation ; how it expands into the 
greater evangelical idea, not by taking a new 
sense, strictly, for God's salvation is ever in 
essence the same, even as the faith that looks to 
it is ever the same — but by rising up towards 
that measurement which is indicated by the 
otherwise inexplicable glow of the language. 

This train of thought might be farther pur- 
sued. It has, however, been dwelt upon here 
simply as the basis of another application, not 
of the same kind, indeed, but suggestive of a 
similar analogy. If an advance of theological 
knowledge may, legitimately, have this retro- 
spective effect in our interpretation of the older 
Scripture, why may not an assured advance in 
physical knowledge give something of the same 
legitimate advantage, putting us in a position to 
see — if it is really God's glory we wish to see — 
more of vastness in the Scriptural language, a vast- 
ness truly there, though veiled by narrowing con- 
ceptions as much outside, in their assumed lite- 
ralness, as the later knowledge that demands 
conformity ? Interpreted from itself it has ample 
room for both. 

For example : the great time ideas had been 
acknowledged by the best minds of an early age. 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 



135 



The older versions, Greek, Latin, and Syriac, had 
given them with remarkable fulness. The strange 
pluralities of the words by which they are set 
forth appear in the Hebrew with a breadth and 
power that cannot so well be expressed in our 
modern, European tongues, in consequence both 
of the vagueness and of the limitations that have 
entered into the age-worn corresponding terms. 
Hence it is that there have been given to such 
expressions as " eternities," " King of eternities," 
" kingdom of all eternities," " world of worlds," 
"ages of ages," " secula seculorum" altogether 
inadequate representatives. This Bible language 
had become narrowed, too, from other causes, 
such as the growing cosmical ignorance 
before alluded to, and the too exclusive predomi- 
nance of that religious dogma of the naked 
divine power which favored the instantaneous or 
mechanical view of creation, and thus threw into 
the background the mighty significance of some 
of the chief w T ords entering into the creative 
account. But when the thoughts of men were 
turned, though in another way, to the antiquity 
of the earth, and the evidence of it all around us 
— as capable of estimate by the common mind, 
when aroused to it, as by the most scientific — 
then this sublime Scriptural account of the 
world's evolution was found to have a vastness felt, 



136 VEDDER LECTURES. 

indeed, before by the profoundest minds, though 
lacking the scientific data for reducing it to a 
definite conception. There was something great, 
mysterious, immeasurable — no thoughtful man 
could read the First of Genesis without feeling 
that — and thus there came easily, or without the 
sense of forcing, the idea that there must be a 
correspondence, in the picture, between the 
great causation and the great effects, the great 
evolutions and the great times through which 
they were divinely evolved. This Scriptural ac- 
count is most unique. It never grew as myths 
and legends are known to grow. It is a whole, 
as it must have presented itself to one mind. 
The thought, then, suggests itself at once. A 
narrative of things so wholly out of the way 
of any human knowledge, direct or traditional, 
is either a studied invention — a thing very 
hard to be believed of that age, and of events 
involving such a religious grandeur of idea — 
or its claim to credence must be grounded on 
the alleged fact of some vision revelation. The 
pictorial style confirms this. It is a painting, 
and, as such, demands a standpoint and a 
perspective that shall bring the whole repre- 
sentation into harmony. In rendering easier the 
attainment of such a pictorial view, science has 
aided us. It has helped us to appreciate the 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. i^y 

vast thought that is in the Scriptures with more 
objective clearness, if not with more subjective 
fulness of emotion. In taking this vantage 
ground, we do not hamper ourselves by any def- 
erence to outside authority. We explore the 
Bible anew, but with the feeling that we are 
not putting upon it a new sense. It is simply 
getting from this sublime Biblical frontispiece 
what lies fairly within the scope of its mighty 
purpose, and the full significance of its most 
vivid as well as most suggestive language. 



LECTURE IV. 

COSMICAL ARGUMENT CONTINUED. — WORLDS 
IN TIME. 



LECTURE IV. 

COSMICAL ARGUMENT CONTINUED. — WORLDS IN 
TIME. 

The creative account— Six solar days — Creation in time— Ideas of growth, 
succession, evolution — Difficulties of the solar day theory — The word day — 
Theperiodical in distinction from the mere metaphorical sense — Language 
of birth and growth, as patent on the first of Genesis — Proportion in times 
necessary to its conceivability— Feeling of vastness in the creative account 
— Its exceeding sublimity — Its language to be treated as self-interpreting — 
The words darkness, night, light, day, to be determined from the account 
itself— The first day determines all the rest — The whole creation called 
a day — No mention of short days in other parts of Scripture — No abso- 
lute measure of time — Ratios alone conceivable — Impression of vastness 
in other creative descriptions of the Bible, Psalm xc — Mountains born — 
Birth-travail of the earth — Proverbs viii — Leaves an impression of immense 
antiquity — Job xxxviii — The sea born — The Hebrew terms expressive of a 
struggle of forces — The ungovernable sea — Psalm civ — Summary of Biblical 
creative ideas — Charge of narrowness against the Scriptures repelled — 
Stuart and Hitzig on the absence of divided time in the world to come — 
The view unscriptural — The Malkuth kol Olamim, or "kingdom of all 
eternities" — iEonic words of the New Testament. 

The Bible in its relation to the space aspect of the 
universe was considered in the previous lecture. 
The time aspect in connection with the infidel ar- 
gument drawn from our later cosmical and geo- 
logical science, next demands our attention. The 
Mosaic account of the terrestrial primordia has 
become one of the principal grounds on which 
modern scepticism assails the credibility of Rev- 
elation. At the same time it has not received 
from our theologians and commentators that at- 
tention which its importance, as an outpost, at 

(HO 



1 4 2 VEDDER LECTURES. 

least, if not the very citadel of divine truth, so 
imperatively demands. Its defence has been, in 
a great degree, left to the mere assertion of the 
truisms before alluded to, such as the impos- 
sibility that the book of nature should contra- 
dict the book of inspiration, since God is the au- 
thor of both ; and then the argument that follows 
is drawn almost wholly from science, or some 
assumed scheme of agreement, instead of being 
derived from the Bible itself, or any attempt at 
an exposition of its wondrous ideas as grounded 
on fair and careful exegesis. 

The theory of six solar days, each of twenty- 
four hours as now measured by the risings and 
settings of the sun, is seldom maintained at the 
present day, whether the Mosaic account is sup- 
posed to refer to the terrestrial or to the cosmical 
creation. This more limited view was the one gen- 
erally held, and truthfully held, we may say, when 
the purely religious idea of a divine creation 
was the one prominently demanded, and there 
were no outside views pressingly calling atten- 
tion to the processes and the times, although it 
could not have failed to be seen by the thought- 
ful reader that creation in time, creation by 
order, by evolving successions, generation, birth, 
growth, was an idea lying on the very face 
of the letter, and repeated with emphatic variety 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 143 

of diction. Still the length of these times, the 
evolutions implied in this peculiar language of 
creation, or rather of generation, were, in the 
main, overlooked as subordinate, or non-essential 
ideas. It cannot be denied, however, that they 
drew the attention of some thoughtful minds, 
and those the greatest known in the early ages of 
the Church. This has been already alluded to. 
But the question comes to us for our own exe- 
getical determination : Is there a time aspect, a 
real time aspect, in the creative account ? Does 
the evidence lie upon its very face? Does this 
temporal idea enter into it as well as those of 
power and a divine causation? Does the very 
harmony of this w r onderful narrative, the true 
perspective of this marvelous picture, require 
that there should be also a true proportion in 
these times, so as to make it a veritable creation in 
time, instead of a mere show of it out of analogy 
with the temporal processes fairly suggested by 
the generative language employed ? There can 
be no doubt of the ideas that would have arisen 
in our minds, had no time word been used. 
The great eventualities, as narrated one after 
the other, would have resolved themselves into 
corresponding periods. The " seas gathering," 
the "land appearing," its surface "drying," the 
waters " swarming" with life, the earth " bringing 



144 VEDDER LECTURES. 

forth," the " herb-seeding- seed," man making 
his appearance as the latest evolution of the 
evoking Word ; all this would have associated 
itself with an harmonious ideal of times and 
successions, having something of that true pro- 
portion without which the events, as events, 
cannot well be conceived. No language in it- 
self can be more opposed to that idea of me- 
chanical or outside fabrication, which is some- 
times ignorantly charged upon the Mosaic 
account. 

Now, does the introduction of the word day 
control all this other peculiar phraseology, or 
is it to be controlled by it, especially in view 
of its well-known cyclical or periodical idea in 
all the earliest forms of speech, and still show- 
ing its traces in numerous modern idioms? 
This is the great question for the interpreter, 
although there are others of equal importance 
that demand attention in connection with it. 
Give us room here, if the language allows it. 
Do there fairly come in the ideas of vastness, of 
great successions, of mighty evolutions originated 
by a series of divine fiats ? If the picture gives 
us this, it gives us something more to complete 
the harmony of its divine perspective. Have we, 
then, this room ? Have we this mighty order 
from chaos to light, from light to life, from life 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 



145 



to humanity, — commencing in darkness, form- 
lessness, and vapor, rising by a succession of 
most sublime stages, through the vegetable and 
the animal, up to a world of rational, moral, and 
spiritual being ? Have we this room ? Then let 
science fill up the details of the grand outline 
according to her means, and at her leisure. 
There will always be room enough in it for 
her as well as for the theologian. Whether draw- 
ing on fact or fancy, she will always find her- 
self somewhere within the bounds of this roll 
of development. Even should one succeed, or 
fancy that he had succeeded, in bringing the 
Scriptural account, in all its stages, to a perfect 
agreement with some scientific scheme, without 
any overlappings or interlappings, or deviations 
of parallel, it would be of little avail, since 
there is no knowing how long that scientific lan- 
guage might maintain its stamp, or how long 
that scientific scheme would last before being 
superseded by another. 

But this is a lecture and not a treatise. Only 
a few points, therefore, can be presented, and 
they are all that are necessary for a fair un- 
derstanding of the whole question, resting, as it 
does, on certain strong grounds which can be 
clearly, yet briefly, enumerated. There is, — 

1st. The immense difficulty of reconciling the 
7 



I46 VEDDER LECTURES. 

primordial epochs of creation, as given in Genesis, 
with the conception of a first day, having its be- 
ginning even before the light, and yet made as a 
day is now made by the rising and setting, or by 
the setting and rising of the sun. If it be said 
that we need not suppose those diurnal com- 
mencings and endings, and especially that first 
one of all, to be made as now, but in some other 
mysterious manner, that would seem like giving 
up the prime ground of those who have most to 
say about literal interpretation, or about the 
word day meaning day, that is, an ordinary solar 
day, and nothing more. If it is not an ordinary 
day, then it is an extraordinary day, or a dies 
ineffabilis, as Augustine calls it, and they know 
not how far this may lead them. Some such 
idea of ineffability seems to have been in the 
early Jewish mind in the days of Josephus, if we 
may judge by what he says of it in the begin- 
ning of the first book of his Antiquities. If any 
choose to introduce the word mysterious, they 
must make more of it. If they talk of unknown 
hypothetical methods, they should be modest in 
their denunciations of those whom they charge 
with profanely departing from the plain letter of 
the account. The mysterious, the ineffable, are 
here undoubtedly, but it may be in the very nature 






THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. i^j 

of the day, or its ineffable duration, as well as in the 
manner of its phenomenal production. The one 
is no more an indispensable element of the diurnal 
idea than the other. A certain duration is no more 
a fixed component of the notion suggested by the 
term, than a stated rising and setting of the sun, 
or some revolution, real or apparent, by which 
they are produced. The making of such a solar 
day in the primordial epoch, as described in the 
account, and giving it its exact length of twenty- 
four hours, half for the day and half for the mys- 
terious night that precedes, is a difficulty not 
created by science, not to be cured by it. It is 
patent on the very face of the account, if we 
would make it consistent with itself, and it must 
have been as evident to the early unscientific 
mind to whom the vision was first given, and by 
whom it was first narrated, as it is to us. In his 
ecstatic vision, he sees no sun rising over the 
dark waters of the tehom, but he hears a voice 
saying, " Let there be light," and a light shines 
out of the chaos, and upon the chaos ; formless- 
ness gives way to form and visibility ; and this is 
the morning of his first day. 

Our second ground of reasoning is the periodi- 
cal sense of the word day, and especially as it is 
used in the early languages, classical and Shem- 



I48 VEDDER LECTURES. 

itic. Closely connected with this is the sense 
of day as a completed time, or the epochal idea, 
as it may be called : 

" Longa dies perfecto temporis orbe." 

This epochal sense is a very different thing from 
the metaphorical, with which some would con- 
found it, and which, by itself, would furnish a 
very weak support for so grave an argument. 
Tropical or metaphorical would denote merely a 
metaphora, or transfer to another form of thought, 
presenting merely an analogy of cause, effect, or 
incidental resemblance. Day, however, as epoch 
or cycle, carries with it the essential idea of 
completed period with its completed work. It is 
a rounded course, determined not by mere dura- 
tion, however measured, but by an order of move- 
ment having its proper commencement and end- 
ing as made by two contrasted states, as of rest 
and progress, torpor and movement, death and 
life, birth and growth, appearance and disappear- 
ance, light and darkness, or evening and morning 
— the one the privation or minimum, the maxi- 
mum or complement, of the other. Any one 
such application of the word day, dies, yom, to any 
completed cyclical ordo, is no more metaphorical 
than any other. Of such a time period the solar 
day is to us the nearest, shortest, and most visible 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT, j^g 

representative. Hence it easily enters language 
as its readiest denominator. Thus day is used 
for ordo, period, series of events, longer or 
shorter, whilst year is rarely, generation more 
frequently, but week, month, century, never em- 
ployed for any such purpose. The language, 
then, is not arbitrary, nor metaphorical, nor de- 
pending on the fancy, but has a law determining 
the class of ideas to which it is applied. Hence 
dies in Latin is used for the period of human life, 
as 7]fiepa in Greek is sometimes synonymous with 
atov, or age, used in the same way — the period of 
existence, life with its evening and morning, its 
coming out of darkness, and its emergence into 
light — venire in diem, as the Romans said. That 
we are not forcing things here is shown by the 
undeniable fact, that this cyclical idea is attached 
to the word yom in the second chapter, where 
it most unmistakably represents the whole pro- 
cess, or rounded period of creation, whether re- 
garded as tellurian or cosmical. It is all one day 
from the primordial chaos up to man: "These 
are the generations of the earth and heavens, in 
the day the Lord created them" — in their being 
created. The Hebrew is exegetical : EfcOSHSj " * n 
the process called their being created" — the in- 
tinitive in this case being more pictorial than 
any noun representing simply the fact or event 



150 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



of creation could possibly have been. " Before 
the day" was, or "from the day " I am He. Isaiah 
xliii. 13. The day of the prophet must be the 
great day mentioned here — dies longissima perfecto 
tempores orbe. It immediately suggests to us the 
7]\iEpdv al&vog, the asonic day, or the day of eternity, 
as the language is used. II. Peter iii. 18. We 
also think of the last great day of which the 
Scripture so solemnly speaks, that "consumma- 
tion of the ages, avvreXsia r&v aluvov, that rounded 
series of events, be it longer or shorter, when the 
closing physical changes shall take place, or the 
present mundane system shall be wound up as 
preparatory to a new day of creation still more 
complete and glorious. The language of the 
Scriptural protology is simply parallel to that 
of its eschatology ; and there should be no hesi- 
tation in applying the same mode of exegesis in 
the one case that we so readily admit in the 
other. It might seem like marring the artless 
grandeur of this old language to admit the 
thought of anything studied, and yet it does look 
as though the writer had been led to use this re- 
markable expression of day as applied to the 
whole series, to prevent mistake in its application 
to the six divisions, or as a key to its wider sig- 
nificance, when the course of knowledge should 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 151 

prepare the way for its more easy, but not less 
natural reception. 

The third thing demanding- attention presents 
itself in the words before alluded to as denoting 
growth, succession, evolving, or one thing coming 
out of another, birth, generation ; in a word, all 
that is meant by nature, (f)vatg, £"ri"i5iSV m tne °^ 
languages, and their direct derivatives in the mod- 
ern ; the very name Genesis, as coming from the 
Greek Septuagint version, being suggestive of 
this whole class of ideas ; since $ (3lf3Xog yeveaeog, the 
book of Genesis, or Generation, is but a transla- 
tion of the Hebrew frnMiTI H5& : " These are the 
generations of the heavens and the earth." The 
wonder is that such a kind of language should 
have been so overlooked. There they are, these 
words of birth and evolution, and they are not 
mere meaningless expletives to be shrivelled up 
in their wide significance, by being all made de- 
pendent on the contracted notion we attach to 
the single word of time. There must be propor- 
tion in the chronology, or the time idea, so essen- 
tial an element in the account, cannot keep the 
emphasis its importance so evidently demands. 
Now, in determining the proportion, there is no 
exegetical reason why the word day should over- 
rule the force of all these significant terms, rather 



152 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



than :hat itself should be interpreted by them. 
Without it these other words become wholly 
arbitrary, empty of any available meaning or ap- 
plication — in short, utterly unthinkable. It could 
not have been meant that there was a real 
" growth " and u birth" a real " bringing forth," a 
real " seeding seed," as by some real causation 
passing through all its stages, and yet that the 
cedar of Lebanon, from the quickening of its root- 
germ in the earth to the waving of the topmost 
branch of its lofty height, was produced in the 
same time, or, rather, in an hour or so of the same 
time, with " the hyssop that groweth out of the 
wall." To instantaneous production, reason 
could have made no objection. As a divine fact, 
had it been so revealed, no science could deny 
its possibility. But the other supposed mode, or 
that of great evolutions in inconceivably dispro- 
portionate times, or bearing no analogy to the 
relations of parts thus evolved, is delusive, mag- 
ical, inconceivable, unthinkable. The language 
suggests a process, generative and physical, and 
yet that process lacking the element of ratio, 
without which it cannot, as a process, be made 
an object of thought at all. We cannot conceive 
of growth, or the passing of an organism from one 
stage to another, except as a passage through 
every intervening point, and in proportionate 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 



153 



times. The crowding, therefore, of processes so 
immensely different into times having- so little 
of a corresponding ratio, has all the difficulty of 
instantaneousness, without its grandeur and its 
conceivable rationality as the product of almighty 
power. 

This disturbance of the conceptive faculty 
comes from the assumption of the short solar day 
of a few hours, so apparently conflicting with the 
other no less marked and unmistakable language 
of birth, succession, evolution. Which is to con- 
trol ? Is the single time word to be so inter- 
preted as to take all meaning out of the others? 
This would be all the more strange, when we 
bear in mind that that same word is plainly used 
for the whole great process of creation, from its 
primordial amorphic state, until it ends in the 
Sabbath and in humanity. What right has any 
one to call such reasoning far-fetched, or to re- 
gard it as putting a force upon the language of 
Scripture ? 

The fourth thing to be noticed in this summary 
of an argument is the aspect of vastness — I can 
use no better term — which gives its sublime 
effect to this whole Mosaic account, and especi- 
ally to its beginning. It is somehow felt by a 
thoughtful mind, even when acquiescing in that 
twenty-four hour dav view, which nothing from 
7* 



154 VEDPER LECTURES. 

without has as yet disturbed. Vast power, vast 
bodies, vast forces, vast movements, vast changes, 
vast causations, vast effects ! There comes along 
with it the feeling of vast time. A feeling we 
have called it, for such it is even before it as- 
sumes the form of a distinct exegetical idea. It 
was this which so affected the mind of Augustine, 
and led him to characterize these times as " dies 
ineffabiles" days unspeakable, either as immense 
evolutions, morae, " delays " in nature, as he some- 
times calls them, suspensions, or as transcending 
the idea of time altogether. It is this, too, which 
makes the vision theory of the creative revela- 
tion so acceptable, as giving a relieving perspec- 
tive, carrying what may really seem short, and is 
short, as measured on the canvas, to the vast 
proportion required for the pictorial harmony. 
This may not be the experience of all in the study 
of the passage, but it becomes very strong and 
vivid when a contemplative mind, divesting itself 
of all prepossessions, and giving full admission to 
this sense of grandeur, regards the account as sui 
generis, self-interpreting, defining its own terms 
from the very nature of the ideas presented. 
Thus read, this impression of vastness comes in 
so naturally, that it affects our sense of the times. 
The panorama so spreads out before us ; the dark 
abyss of waters, the breaking light, that first mys- 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 155 

terious evening- of the formless chaos, the morn- 
ing, the separation, the naming, the evoking 
Word — all is so great, so sublime, on the vaster 
scale, that the forcing, if there be any, ap- 
pears wholly in the narrowing interpretation. 
Am I overstating this? Where in ancient or in 
modern literature can there be found a page of 
such superhuman grandeur of conception, of such 
soul-awing majesty of diction as this : " In the 
beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 
And earth was formless and void, and there was 
darkness on the face of the deep. And the breath 
of Elohim was brooding on the face of the 
waters. And God said, Let it be light, and there 
was light. And God saw the light that it was 
good. And God divided between the darkness 
and between the light ; and the light called He 
day, and the darkness called He night ; and there 
was an evening, and there was a morning — day 
one/' The last clause is plainly exegetical, or 
explanatory of what precedes. It tells us what 
this night and morning were. It explains this 
mystery of a day not measured by the sun, but 
having an ineffable division of its own : And thus 
was there an evening, and thus there was a morn- 
ing — day one. The process itself defines them 
in its two great evolving stages : And thus there 
was a night, and thus there was a day, making, 



156 VEDDER LECTURES. 

so far as this Mosaic account is concerned, the 
primordial time in the earth's greater chronology. 
To interpret this rightly, look not abroad. Keep 
to the record, and you will find its meaning there. 
There can be clearly traced all the ideas corre- 
sponding to the mighty words — the night, the 
day, the evening, the morning, for which you are 
seeking. The account is self-interpreting. What 
was that primeval night which comes first in 
this creative movement, as it does in all tradi- 
tional derivations? The answer is most distinct. 
It was the darkness that was resting on the face 
of the deep — the void and formless tehom. How 
long had it been thus resting? No answer is re- 
turned from the silence. To get twelve hours 
here before the light, to find any rule for their 
measurement, their commencement, or their sep- 
aration from anything preceding — to do this is 
the forcing, as I have elsewhere shown, and shall 
not therefore dwell upon it in this rapid sum- 
mary. And where is the morning? Once more 
we interrogate the oracular language. The an- 
swer comes again with unmistakable clearness : 
It was the light which the divine Word evolved 
from the darkness — the light that shone not only 
on the darkness, but " out of the darkness," kit rov 
onoTovg, as the Apostle understands it. These two 
events make the chronological day, the primeval 



THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. 157 

period with its own peculiar work and history 
separate from all others. It is God himself who 
names and defines them, whatever may be the 
import of that mysterious language. He gives 
us our lexicon here : And the darkness He call- 
ed night, and the light called He day — and thus 
there was an evening, and thus there was a morn- 
ing — day one. We get a reason for the strange 
repetition of that solemn heraldic formula, taking 
away all its seeming tautology. Why so often 
said, and with such a proclamatory sameness, un- 
less to call attention to something extraordinary 
in the mornings and evenings so announced? 
The view taken is drawn fairly from the lan- 
guage arousing wonder like the similar heraldic 
announcements of the seals and trumpets in the 
Revelations. But now attempt to force in the 
measurement of twenty-four hours, and what a 
collapse of grandeur, what a derangement of 
proportion seems immediately to take place. I 
have dwelt upon this, because anxious to give 
the impression so strong and clear to my own 
mind, that these ideas of vastness come directly 
from the face of the account, as read in its own 
clear light, and are not forced upon it by any out- 
side pressure. An interpretation thus pressed 
upon us from without undermines faith instead of 
affording any sure foundation. We use with 



158 VEDDER LECTURES. 

confidence the language of Augustine : " These 
are God-named times, God-divided times." 
There is a vastness in the language, an infinite 
suggestiveness compared with which, so far as 
sublimity is concerned, the geological decimals 
are utterly frigid and unemotional. The mind 
is not narrowed in believing the Mosaic record 
of creation. 

The first great day determines all the rest. 
They all have the mark of this higher chronol- 
ogy. They were all divine evolutions. In each 
of them the old chaotic darkness and formless- 
ness more and more disappear. New mornings 
break forth, "shining clearer and clearer unto 
the perfect day," when humanity, as it had been 
physically evolving out of the dust of all below, 
becomes complete in the primus homo, made such 
by the inspiration of God, and set forth as the 
type of a new and higher order of being. Here 
is no forcing. It is a view that comes from 
the very spirit of the sublime passage, breath- 
ing through every mysterious word, and filling 
the soul of the devout reader with a feeling of 
its truthfulness, as well as of its glory. It re- 
quires no scientific hypothesis. It transcends 
science. It needs no " reconciliation ; " for it 
stands out of the reach of all collision. 

In the fifth place I would briefly call atten- 



THE C0SM1CAL ARGUMENT. 



159 



tion to this aspect o { ' vastness, these ideas of 
great time successions, as they appear in other 
parts of the Bible. They have, indeed, a poet- 
ical character, but this strengthens the argu- 
ment. It was this very aspect on which I am 
insisting that made the creative times such a 
grand subject for poetry, and called out, in rela- 
tion to them, such a poetical pictorialness. And 
here is to be noticed, in the first place, a fact that 
demands special attention. It is the absence, 
from all other parts of the Scriptures of any al- 
lusion to these brief days as such, or as being 
solar in their character. The Fourth Command- 
ment forms no real exception to this remark ; 
since it is simply a repetition of the earlier lan- 
guage, carrying with it the same scale of inter- 
pretation, and confirming it by the undeniable 
difference that must be admitted between the 
divine and human days, if we would preserve at 
all the analogous parallel between the human 
work, the human rest, on the one hand, the inef- 
fable divine work, and the ineffable divine rest 
on the other. There is no longer type and anti- 
type, no temporal sign of the Ionian Sabbath, 
when both are reduced to the same measure- 
ment. Now in all the other passages which 
are not repetition^- but vivid descriptions drawn 
from this original picture, the brief solar day, 



160 VEDDER LECTURES. 

had it been really conceived as such, would have 
been the most memorable, the most likely to 
be recalled, of all the features of the account. 
It would have been the great wonder, had the 
Hebrew mind truly received from it such an 
idea of chronological brevity. But no such 
feeling anywhere shows itself. In some places 
we have what seems to be a representation of 
instantaneousness : " He spake and it was, He 
commanded and it stood ; " but that refers to the 
divine Word, or Fiat, as accomplished in its very 
utterance — " the Word running very swiftly," 
to use the language of the Psalmist, or as a 
very early apocryphal writer interprets it, 6 
Xoyog diTJtcoyv rrdorjg fuvrjoeoyg KLVTjriKGyrepog, " the per- 
vading Word having a more rapid movement 
than all motion ; " to us, indeed, the slow course 
of nature and the ages, to God, swifter than 
any electric current. To the divine mind all 
effects must be patent in their causes, whether 
natural or supernatural, and so the first, which is 
this outgoing Word, is the veritable fulfilment 
of the remotest sequence. This is shown in that 
solemn formula so oft repeated in Genesis, »p irpii 
" and it was so," it stood firm ; the nature com- 
menced by the fiat had in it all that should be 
evolved until that seminal force was spent, 
or had prepared the way designed for a new 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. j6i 

evolution. But we know from the account it- 
self, that neither in respect to the universal or 
any partial development, was it instantaneous. 
It was a creation in time. Such is a prominent 
idea of the representation. Was it real or 
seeming ? Had it relative proportion in its 
parts? For of time, irrespective of its ratios, 
we have no more any absolute measure than we 
have of space. It is an axiom of Newton that 
the space worlds might all exist within the 
compass of what we call an inch, and yet every 
ratio perfectly maintained as now existing be- 
tween the parts. We are forced to admit the 
same of time. The earthly history might all lie 
within the extent of a minute, and yet with a 
perfect proportion in every measure of its event- 
ualities. Thus regarded, rapidity of growth is 
wholly relative, though still growth in the truest 
sense of the word. We have something like 
this before our very eyes. In the few weeks' 
incubation of the egg there is a series of trans- 
formations, without leap or discontinuance, a 
transition through every stage, and with as many 
eventualities as Darwin's imagination finds in 
the ages intervening between a portion of the 
mundane egg of the nebulous fluid and the 
perfect species as it now exists. Till science 
can explain this, it should be more modest in 



162 VEDDER LECTURES. 

its claims to understand the secret of life and 
the origin of worlds. In fact, time absolute, 
having no relation to other times, is inconceiv- 
able. It is ratio that makes its rationality as an 
object of thought. With it, time properly begins. 
Proportion is demanded, or the ideas of birth, 
growth, order, succession — in a word, ot genesis 
or generation, — become wholly illusory. With- 
out it, it is not succession, — the succession of 
causality; it is not order; it is not natural; 
it is not supernatural, originating nature and 
working in it. It is contranatural, unnatural, 
out of all order, out of all analogy. It 
lacks alike the grandeur of instantaneousness, 
and the reasonableness of a proportional evolu- 
tion. The language employed in Genesis 
would not have been used for a causality which 
is neither timeless, nor having the proportions 
which a real chronology demands. 

We see this in studying those other passages 
in the Bible of which creation forms the theme. 
There is nowhere in them any allusion to this 
wonder of time suspension, as in the miracles of 
Joshua and Hezekiah. A far greater marvel 
would it have been, far more likely to enter 
into the thought and demand the attention, had 
such time brevities, or time suspensions, been 
really regarded as belonging to the story of crea- 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 163 

tion, and as characterising- its great eventual- 
ities. What a mighty series ! Light evolving 
from a primeval chaos, waters dividing, an at- 
mospherical firmament uprising, seas gathering 
to their beds, oceans subsiding, lands upheaving, 
the dry soil appearing, coming into view, 
making itself visible, as the pictorial Hebrew 
gives it by an optical deponent verb so sug- 
gestive of gradualness — the waters teeming with 
life of every kind from the infusoria to the tan- 
ninim, or great monsters of the deep — the ground 
bringing forth from the fungus to the oak — the 
celestial bodies beginning their time divisions — 
man at last derived in some way from the pre- 
vious elements of nature, his physical thus 
coming from the dust, " first of the earth earthly," 
then inspired by God, separated from nature by 
the divine image, raised above nature — in an 
ineffable manner constituted a sexual duality — in- 
vested with the dominion of the world — wonders 
like these, evolutions like these, and all taking 
place between sun and sun of a 24-hour solar- 
day — a creation in time indeed, and that makes 
it the greater wonder, but without the propor- 
tions which such an immense diversity of works 
would demand in a real causal or time process 
wherein the parts bore a due relation, to say 
the least, to each other ! Now this might have 



164 VEDDER LECTURES. 

been. Our argument is not now to be under- 
stood as contending against the possibility of 
such a series of events in themselves considered, 
or the credibility of such a time hastening, or 
time suspension. It is the exceeding improb- 
ability, the inconceivability, I might almost 
say, of the fact, that such a wonderful dis- 
proportion between the times and the succes- 
sions so graphically set forth should have ac- 
tually been in the thought of the Psalmist, and 
other Scriptural writers who dwell upon the 
creative scenes, and yet without the least men- 
tion of it, though forming, as it would have done, 
the great marvel of the account. 

Are we not justified, then, in the conclusion 
that the creative account, of which the poetical 
writers of the Bible are so full, did not so pre- 
sent itself to the old Hebrew mind ? The fact 
is most significant in respect to the earliest inter- 
pretations of this most ancient document. 

In proof, let me first refer especially to Ps. xc, 
civ., Prov. viii., and Job xxxviii. From all these 
we derive a peculiar impression. It is that same 
feeling of vastness by which we are affected in 
reading the narrative in Genesis ; vastness of 
power, vastness of event, vastness of time, all 
alike transcending measurement. Now, from 
none of these later pictures, if studied by them- 



THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. ifc 

selves, would such an idea of solar days, or of 
comparatively brief time successions, have ever 
been obtained. In all of them the idea of great 
evolutions in correspondent times is strikingly 
suggested, as it is also in the Persian cosmogony, 
evidently a copy of this old painting, but in 
which " six times " appear as the translation of 
the " six days." It may be referred to as one of 
the strongest proofs in respect to that oldest un- 
derstanding of this matter which is now said to 
have been forced upon us by modern science. 
In the Biblical passages referred to, if we regard 
them as standing by themselves, there is nothing 
to interfere with the largest exegesis. The great 
ideas, the frnblh, generations, evolutions, coming 
out of one thing, or of one state of things, from 
another, appear everywhere, both descriptively 
and etymologically. They present vividly every 
conception of the old account except that of the 
brief day. I have already remarked on that 
early title as given in the beginning of Gen. ii., 
" the generations of the heavens and the earth." 
The language of Job and the Psalms might be re- 
garded as a commentary, or even as a transla- 
tion. So the Greek title before alluded to, (lipXog 
yeveaecjg, the book of Genesis, has something about 
it most significant. There can hardly be a doubt 
that this name, and the other generative terms 



t66 vedder lectures. 

sounding then in the near vernacular of the 
Septuagint version, did exert an influence on the 
early Greek Church, and especially on men like 
Origen and Clement, in predisposing them to 
the wider interpretation of times and causalties. 
The very word Genesis, although it is an exact 
representative of the Hebrew irnbin* was un- 
favorable to any idea of arbitrary or mechan- 
ical fabrication. Had that name been given to 
our English version : " The Book of Generations " 
— the generations of the earth and heavens — it is 
not too much to say that it would have greatly 
modified the common thinking on this great 
subject. 

The language of the XC. Psalm has an unmis- 
takable reference to the creative and anti-creative 
times. The allusion is not simply to ancient his- 
torical times on earth, to which the olamic or 
geonian words are sometimes applied ; for it was 
at a period before " the hills were born," that God 
existed, Q:>"|2 12"! dbl2fa> from Olam to Olam, 
dnb rov al&voq nat eug rov al&vog, a scecnlo in sceculnm, 
" from world to world." Before the mountains 
were bom : It is the passive of the verbal root of the 
noun £"i"nbi£n, rendered generations. Poetical, it 
may be said, but we have Aristotle's authority for 
holding that poetry may be most closely allied to 
philosophy. We know, too, that from early vivid 



THE COSMIC 'A L ARGUMENT. 167 

metaphors philosophy draws its most impressive 
language, however fossilized it may become in 
its later abstractedness. " Before the mountains 
were from — we put the emphasis on this word — 
before thou hadst for med the earth or the world " : 
The translation of the second clause is inadequate, 
and too suggestive of bare mechanical or outside 
fabrication. The verb employed is wholly and 
strikino-lv generative, and the idea of formation 
it denotes must correspond to it.* It is a term 
used to describe the pangs of child-birth, from the 
primary significance of twisting, thence writhing, 
struggle, torture, just as the latter word comes 
from the Latin word torqueo. Hence, in the 
next stage, it becomes a general term for partu- 
rition, from which the translation is direct to 
that of production, or physical birth. But the 
writhing, struggling, agonizing sense ever ad- 
heres to it in all its applications. It is produc- 
tion with labor, with overcoming strength ex- 



* Had the word employed been the more outward or seem- 
ingly mechanical term of formation, like -^n or ntES'j tne 
idea would have been the same, though less vividly expressed. 
For Scripture sometimes seems to reverse its language : "Be- 
fore I formed thee," {fashioned, 1£"H!£" , )> ^ was sa -id of 
Jeremiah. Here an undoubted generative process is repre- 
sented as a direct work. So the "possessing the reins," the 
" overshadowing in the womb," (the quickening), and the 
"fashioning of the members," in Psalm cxxxix. 



1 68 VEDDER LECTURES. 

erted against resisting forces. The old Greek 
and Latin translators read the Hebrew word 
without vowels, and regarded it as passive, with 
the third person feminine preformative instead of 
the second person masculine. Hence they ren- 
dered : " before were formed or generated, ysvvtj- 
Orjvai, the earth and the world." The Syriac 
makes " earth " the subject, and yet renders it 
actively : " Before earth travailed in the birth," 
keeping up the same figure that is used in respect 
to the mountains. With the established Maso- 
retic punctuation, the only maintainable ren- 
dering is that which takes it as active, with Deity 
for the subject, and yet giving it the common 
travailing or parturitive sense: " Before the 
mountains were born, yea, before thou didst 
travail in birth with the earth or the world, from 
olam to olam, from eternity to eternity, art 
thou, O God." It is an awful figure ; the anthro- 
popathism is, indeed, a most bold and startling 
one ;* but a tremendous idea was demanding ut- 



* By giving the verb here the passive punctuation, and re- 
garding " earth " as the subject, taken in the feminine, we 
avoid the anthropopathism that some might deem offensive : 
" Before the earth travailed in the throes of parturition? 
But it is the same great idea of immense forces struggling in 
the womb of generation. The boldest rendering, however, is 
not only the most grammatical, but most clearly in the style ot 
Scripture. So God's love is compared to a mother's yearning 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. j6g 

tcrance, and the soul of the prophet, the " Man 
of God," as he is called in the title of this very 
old psalm, was laboring to bring it forth. It is 
the birth travail in the production of the world, 
and that, strange as the thought may appear, 
ascribed to Deity ! If it is an " accommodation," 
as some would call it, an aid to our effort at con- 
ceiving the ineffable, then let us be humbly ac- 
commodated by it: 

Before the hills were born, or earth 

The throes of life had known, 
From world to world, art thou, O God ; 

Immovable Thy throne. 

For emotional grandeur ; for the feeling that 
comes from the " Living Word," and without 
which thought and knowledge are dead, what 
are meiocene, and pleiocene, and eocene, and the 
frigid decimals of the geological notation to the 
power of language like this? There is, too, an 
awful suggestiveness in the figure. It brings up 



affection for her offspring. Isaiah xlix. 15. There is the same 
startling figure in Deut. xxxii. 18 : " The Rock that begat thee, 
the God that bare thee." In the second clause it is the 
participle of this same verb (meholet), and there is the 
same idea of difficulty, God's travailing, as in the birth, with 
the rebellious and refractory Israel, requiring the strongest 
resources of His grace, as here of His power in nature. Hup- 
FELD renders Psalm xc. 2, as above : " Bevor du gebarest 
Erde und Land" See his comment and note on tekolel, iv. p. 6. 



i;70 VEDDER LECTURES. 

the idea of mighty forces in nature, of convulsive 
throes, of immense strugglings, of Titanic resist- 
ances, of a terrible ungovernableness in the cha- 
otic and irrational material, as though rebelling 
against the Logos, the divine Word or Reason 
seeking to penetrate it with its formative, creat- 
ing power, to infuse into it its spermatic ideas, 
and to throw over it the bridle and " the reign " 
of Law. 

A similar feeling of vastness takes possession of 
us as we read Proverbs viii., 22-31, or the sublime 
description of the Hypostatic Wisdom, its eternal 
generation, its everlasting going forth in the ideal 
structure of the worlds. What a mountain of 
grandeur does it display as it so suddenly rises 
upon us from the comparatively lower plain of 
this ethical book! There is much of the same 
language we find in the XC. Psalm, whilst there 
still more vividly presents itself the thought of 
stages of antiquity going far back, one after the 
other, to that most ancient date of all when Wis- 
dom was alone with God, the First Born npb rtiv 
al6v(*)v, before the beginning of His creative 
ways. We recognize in it the choral anthem 
of Genesis, with its key-note of ineffable times. 
There is the same thought of great succes- 
sions, of an organic structure, like a ktlok;, a 
building, rising stage after stage to its com- 



THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. iji 

pletion. The Word and the architectonical Wis- 
dom are one. It is not only the commanding, 
the fiat-giving voice, but the shaping, organizing, 
harmonizing agent, ''rejoicing ever before Him, 
and whose delight was with the sons of men." 
Day after day, yom, yom, is he represented as 
contemplating this rising structure until its con- 
summation in humanity, in the beings who were 
to bear His image, as He is the image of the in- 
visible God, and whom He had " loved before the 
foundations of the world." The word day occurs 
here also ; but were the passage read by itself, no 
one would ever think of twenty -four hours. The 
whole spirit of the language repels it. 

The thoughts on which we have been dwell- 
ing, the ideas of succession, of generation, of 
struggle, of birth-travail, of strong resistance, are 
no less visible in the remarkable descriptions at 
the close of the Book of Job. As in the repre- 
sentations of the Psalmist the mountains and the 
earth are born, so here the sea has its natal pe- 
riod. There are more striking poetical accom- 
paniments, but it is the same figure of birth, 
generation, genesis, (pvacg, natura, which lies at the 
root of all early contemplative language, and, as 
before remarked, has become fixed, formed, fos- 
silized, as it were, and unemotional, in philosoph- 
ical and scientific speech. The sea issues from 



1^2 VEDDER LECTURES. 

the womb of the great evolution ; for to what 
else can the mighty figure refer? It is nursed 
like the infant ; the araphel, the primeval dark- 
ness, is its swathing band. But it is an infant giant 
full of mighty energies. As it grows in strength, 
it becomes a most stubborn and rebellious 
power. It is well-nigh ungovernable. It even 
seems to tax the Almighty strength : " When 
I broke over it my law." There is immense force 
in the language as thus most literally rendered. 
Our version : "When I broke up for it its decreed 
place," comes near to it, but changes the figure, 
adding the idea of place to that of law, or decree 
clearly expressed by the word, as Jerem. xxxi. 35, 
"the laws of the moon and stars ;" Job. xxxviii. 33, 
"the laws of the Heaven and the earth," and else- 
where, " the law of the rain." It falls short, too, of 
the significance of the preposition, "pi^, " upon" or 
" over it." The verb is a very common one, with 
a very uniform significance, but it sounds so 
strange here, that commentators have been far 
out of their way to get for it the sense of de- 
cision, which it never truly has, either in the 
Hebrew or in the Arabic. Umbreit shows 
great insensibility to the grandeur of the pas- 
sage, when he attempts to get for it the sense 
of measuring. Schlottmann, the best of the com- 
mentators on Job, gives the true force of the 



THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. jy<$ 

word : " There is in this verb "-QttJ," he says, " the 
idea of immense force." He finds in the pas- 
sage the figure of " an almighty power oppos- 
ing itself to the stubborn force of the young 
sea striving to extend itself towards the infinite." 
The poetry is in the reversal of the figure we 
should expect. It is law dashed, or dashing itself 
against the sea — the strongest mode of repre- 
senting the ungovernable sea dashing itself 
against law, and reduced by it to the limits God 
has assigned. It has the same picture of strug- 
gle as is presented in the parturitive language of 
Psalm xc. ; — an anthropopathism, indeed, but fur- 
nishing the strongest expressions for the fact of 
mighty forces in the early natures. It gives us 
most vividly the idea of a real law, a real caus- 
ality, instead of a train of shadowy sequences 
such as a very late, as well as a very old, philos- 
ophy would represent nature as being. 

The CIY. Psalm is full of similar ideas. The 
creative periods are evidently in the writer's 
mind, as is admitted by Hupfeld, one of the most 
rationalising commentators. Vast eventualities 
are there, but there is not the slenderest sug- 
gestion of their brevity, or of any solar day meas- 
urement. The impression is all the other way. 
Sublimity, vastness in time and space, successive 
stages of life, in the waters, in the earth, in the 



174 VEDDER LECTURES. 

air — changes in the condition of the earth, the 
covering deep, " the mountains going up, the 
valleys going down," till they find " the places 
appointed for them." The soul swells with these 
vast conceptions, the canvas seems to dilate, but 
the narrow time idea nowhere appears ; should 
it be forced into it, it would be like a collapsing 
of the whole picture. Its absence from such a 
painting can only be accounted for on the sup- 
position that the writer of the Psalm derived no 
such thought from his inspiring model. Other 
passages might be examined in the same manner, 
and to the same purpose, but our present limits 
will not permit. My hearers will not misunder- 
stand the ground or reason of this course of argu- 
ment. It is not the absolute verity either of the 
Scriptural, or of any scientific view, as compared 
with each other, with which we are, in the first 
place, concerned. The beginnings, and pro- 
cesses ot creation, in their interior causalities, are 
ineffable things. They are linked with the in- 
finite, and must transcend the finite understand- 
ing. It is only shadows that we can see in the 
best representations of them as adapted to our 
minds. The Scriptural and the scientific may 
present a general outline parallelism, but it is no 
disparagement to the former to say that both will 
doubtless require supplementing, when we cease 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 



175 



" to behold them as in a mirror enigmatically," 
or if we are ever brought face to face with these 
dppTjTa, these now unutterable and inconceivable 
facts of time-transcenaing origin. In all that is 
here said, the design has simply been to meet 
that objection drawn from astronomy and geol- 
ogy, or the later knowledge of the cosmos, which 
I have unyieldingly kept in mind. It takes this 
shape : The view of things derived from the 
Scriptures is narrow ; the creative account is 
rendered obsolete by the advance of science 
with its expansions of time and space. Now 
which is really the grander view ? That is the 
question. Do the conceptions .of the Bible, or 
those that may be legitimately drawn from it, 
narrow the mind ; or do they, on the other hand, 
carry it to a height where induction falters, or 
utterly fails to follow ? The question is not, 
which gives us the most of fact knowledge, 
or fact sequence, or of a dead mathematical 
science never getting beyond the bare facts of 
force and motion endlessly repeated, but which 
most vividly reveals to us, in its grand paintings, 
the true causality, the real law of life ? Which 
presents the-sublimer view, the correlation of 
forces, or the Scripture doctrine of the Logos ? 
Let this be kept in view as the true issue and 
the true mode of stating it. 



Ij6 VEDDER LECTURES. 

What, then, are the true ideas given to us in 
the First of Genesis as expressed in that old and 
peculiar language ? They are : ist, Creation, or 
the causing that to be which before was not, 
whether in so saying, regard be had to the idea, 
the essential form, or to the matter. 2d, Creation 
by God a personal and designing power. 3d, 
Creation by the Word, the Logos, or informing 
Reason, the Bible mode of representing what 
science would unmeaningly style creation by law, 
or rather evolution itself the law, however 
things may be evolved. 4th, Creation in time. 
5th, An outline representation of creation in six 
principal times. 6th, Creation by successions, 
generations, births, or the bringing forth of one 
thing, or one state of things, out of another. 7th, 
Progressive creation, each step an advance on 
the one preceding, from the lower to the higher 
stages of being, — an idea which science has bor- 
rowed, but which her inductions cannot prove, 
though they often seem to contradict, 8th, The 
repeated declaration at each stage, p iJTH, "and 
it was so,'' or it became firm, established, se- 
curing the permanent continuance of each new 
word, thus making a reality of that idea of law 
of which science talks so much, but for which, in 
her bare fact causality, she can find no real 
basis. 



THE COSMICAL ARGUMENT. 



177 



These are the essential ideas, of the Scriptural 
account of creation. Science may worthily 
occupy herself with tracing and filling up, but 
can never reach, much less transcend them. 

I have dwelt on this Mosaic account of crea- 
tion, as it is called, because it has become the 
main target of modern scepticism. An affectation 
of contempt has been added to deadly hostility. 
It is too narrow, the time has gone by for any 
longer belief in it. The changes are rung in this 
way throughout our literary world. Ignorance is 
constantly reiterating it ; the young mind es- 
pecially is overcome by the sheer impudence of 
its repetition. But the objection is not confined 
to the creation narrative. The Bible, it is said, 
is narrow throughout. It is confined to the 
idea of one world in space, our little earth. It 
knows, moreover, but one world in time, the 
single earthly epoch, not long ago starting out of 
nothingness, with a blank undivided antepast eter- 
nity immediately preceding, then a narrow isth- 
mus of time close shut in on the other side by a 
similar blank of undivided duration. In opposition 
to this I would present the greater time aspect 
of the Bible as revealed in its great aeonic 
words, to which due attention has not been 
given by many commentators, as they have been 
entirely overlooked by the scientists, and the 



1 78 VEDDER LECTURES. 

literary men, who are so fond of making these 
charges of narrowness. Let me have your pa- 
tience in briefly dwelling upon them as the 
closing portion of this lecture. The Olamic 
words, as I would style them, have not only been 
too much overlooked in our Biblical study, but 
some of their most remarkable peculiarities have 
been covered up by general expressions in our 
modern translations. Of these, it may be said 
that none of them exhibit that startling force 
these words carry with them in their original 
Hebrew and Greek, and in the older versions, 
Greek, Latin, and Syriac. The reference is to 
what may be called the seonic words of Scrip- 
ture, the terms of duration undefined by any or- 
dinary chronological measurements, or used as 
transcending time altogether. One feature of 
this class of words, as distinguished from any- 
thing corresponding to them in modern speech, 
presents itself in their remarkable plural forms, 
so vivid in the original, but so disguised, in our 
translation, under the vague adjectives, eternal 
and everlasting. A necessity of human think 
ing brings into the Hebrew language, as in the 
other earliest tongues, a word for a time or 
times transcending history, and incommensurable 
by astronomical phenomena. It is in Hebrew the 
word Di"l^) rendered age, Greek al6v, saeculum, 



THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. T yg 

aeon, and denoting a world, or world time, 
though sometimes hyperbolically applied to long 
historical periods. In its more essential sense, 
however, as used in the course of the Scrip- 
tural development, and especially in the New 
Testament, it means times transcending the his- 
torical earthly movement, whether regarded as 
known or unknown. With its plural Qifti^ es- 
pecially, though so often disregarded in the trans- 
lation, it brings before us the great times of the 
absolute kingdom of God ; as in the XC. Psalm 
already quoted, where the divine existence is rep- 
resented to be Qb"l2 1V1 Ebl2fa> from olam to 
olam, from world to world, as our brief earthly life 
is from year to year, or in its race aspect, from gen- 
eration to generation. In Ps. cxlv. 13, its mighty 
plural is still further extended by a superlative 
word : janfcb* ^ tTObfc "jSV.Dbfr, " Thy king- 
dom is a kingdom of all eternities," an olam made 
up of all olams, a world the complement of all 
worlds, a magnus o?do embracing all periods. 
It is this language which St. Paul had in mind, 
I Tim. ii. 17: fiaoiXevg ro)v cuoyvcjv, "King of the 
Aeons," King of the worlds, of the world-times, 
" Kinge of Worldis," as Wickliffe renders it from 
the Vulgate, Rex Seculorum, " Malco deolme, King 
of the worlds, or leolam leolamolemin, for the world 
and for the world of worlds, as it is given in the so- 



l8o VEDDER LECTURES. 

norous Syriac. Our version/'the King eternal,'' has 
a grand sound, but its vivid time significance is 
greatly marred in the neglect of the plural 
forms. In this way are described the " goings 
forth " of the Logos " from the days of eternity," 
Mic. v. I. It has reference to the birth of Him 
who was to be " ruler in Israel,'' " ruler in the 
great kingdom of God,'' " King of the ages," 
though born in one of the least cities, of one 
of the smallest provinces, of one of the most 
diminutive space worlds of the cosmical uni- 
verse. It was spoken of Him who by His 
personal union with the eternal life-giving, law- 
creating, order-evolving Logos, was to intro- 
duce a new evolution in humanity, raising it 
to a higher sphere transcending the physical, 
and to a brotherhood of higher beings which 
nature never could have reached, nor any 
scientific induction made known. 

The word olam, and the corresponding New 
Testament alov, are reduplicated and retripli- 
cated to express the absolute eternity. They 
are employed to aid the human sense conceiv- 
ing faculty in its goings forth towards that in- 
effable idea, which an abstract negative can 
only name in its unemotional barrenness. In the 
later Biblical Hebrew, and in the books inter- 
vening between the old Jewish and the New 



THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. 181 

Testament canon, olam is used for world, this 
world, the other world, the world to come, 
worlds in general, as expressive of the malcutJi 
kol olamim, or kingdom of all worlds, according 
to the language, Ps. cxlv., xc, and other passages 
in the older Scripture, where the world-sense is 
disguised in the translation. The idea goes into 
the Greek of the later Scripture, modifying the 
classic aiuv, employing its plural form, which is 
comparatively rare in classical usage, and giving 
it the world significance derived from the Hebrew, 
though occasionally found in the Greek poets. It 
is thus that in the New Testament diuv, di&veg, 
are so frequently used for worlds, time worlds, 
as distinguished from Kovfioc, or worlds in space — 
a plural that is never found in the sacred writ- 
ings. The argument is wholly untenable that 
this word al&veq, as thus used in the New Testa- 
ment, denotes stellar or planetary worlds, or 
astronomical spheres in any sense. From its 
predominant usage, the Syriac translators mis- 
took it in some few cases, and the cosmical 
view becomes still more apparent in the later 
Rabbinical ; but it can easily be traced to certain 
crude scientific ideas that began to have in- 
fluence upon this comparatively modern dialect. 
The expression, " time-world" may seem strange 
and forced, but the idea was very easy and nat- 



1 82 VEDDER LECTURES. 

ural to the early mind. It belongs more to the 
interior thought, and has less to do with any 
outward scheme of science, than the space con- 
ception. Hence it is less hindered in its goings 
forth by the limitations of our sense-knowledge. 
It has, moreover, a solid foundation in the ne- 
cessities of the human thinking. A little reflec- 
tion shows us, that the time of a thing is as in- 
herent in its reality, or its true being, as the por- 
tion of space it occupies, or the force which may 
be said to constitute its dynamical entity. 

For very clear proofs, or specimens, of this re- 
markable aeonic language, I would refer to such 
passages as I Cor. ii. 7, npb r&v aluvuv, before the 
aeons, before the worlds, where the reference 
is unmistakably to ante-terrene, ante-mundane 
things : " The wisdom of God in a mystery" — 
" the hidden mystery ordained before the 
worlds" — the moral or spiritual kingdom, with 
its developments, existing before the physical 
worlds, and as the basis of their manifestation in 
time and space : (3a<uXevg rtiv aluvuv, " king of the 
worlds," 1 Tim. i. 17, before referred to : Kara 
TxpoBeoiv r&v alcjvwv, " the design of the worlds," 
Eph. iii. 2 : " To Him be glory during all the 
generations of the world of the worlds," elg 
ixdaag rag yeveag rov alcovog rtiv al&vuv, the world 
that is made up of all worlds, all time successions, 



THE COSMIC A L ARGUMENT. ^3 

all the fciTibivi, or " generations of the heavens 
and the earth,'' all the evolutions of all the eter- 
nities. There is the language used in reference 
to the Logos, Heb. i. 3 : " By whom He made 
the worlds, the aeons." Again, " By faith we 
understand that the al&vag, the worlds, the world 
times, were set in order by the Word of God," 
the architectonical wisdom of Prov. viii. and Heb. 
xi. 3. " To God the Only Wise, be glory, and 
greatness, and might, and dominion, for all 
worlds of worlds," elg rravrag rovg al&vag t&v aluvuv, 
Jude 25, Rev. vii. 12. "And He shall reign elg 
al&vag r&v al&vuv, for ever and for evermore,'' 
through all the eternities of the eternities. We 
ask again : What are meiocene and pleiocene, 
and eocene; what are Prof. Thompson's inter- 
minable rows of idealess and conceptionless 
decimals ; what are our millions and billions, and 
billions of billions ; what are they all for emo- 
tional effect as compared with the living ideas 
that agitate us in the utterance of the ancient 
words, and their sublime reverberations ? It is 
like the barren x y z of a frigid algebraic com- 
putation, as compared with the endless re-echo- 
ings of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. 

The power of this mighty Scripture language 
consists in the fact of its being so far above all 
earthly divisions, leaving them so far behind, not 



1 84 VEDDER LECTURES. 

merely in numerical estimate, but in the power of 
thought they represent. In distinction from 
dead formulas, or dead facts, they are living 
ideas ; they belong to God's great kingdom of 
life and spirit. They carry the soul with them to 
the contemplation of the greater chronology, the 
world of worlds, to which all physical worlds of 
space and time, all purely physical evolutions 
are wholly subordinate, and from connection 
with which, as I have said before, — but it cannot 
be too often repeated, — they derive all their 
value. 



LECTURE V. 

THE KINGDOM OF GOD ; OR, THE GREATNESS OF 
THE BIBLE THEISM, AS COMPARED WITH THE 
PHYSICAL, SCIENTIFIC, AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



LECTURE V. 

THE KINGDOM OF GOD ; OR, THE GREATNESS OF 
THE BIBLE THEISM, AS COMPARED WITH THE 
PHYSICAL, SCIENTIFIC, AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 

Preliminary ideas — Greatness relative — Distinction between conception and idea 
— Names of Deity in Genesis — Value of man not determined, increased or 
diminished, by any space extent of the universe — Psalm viii. and its interpre- 
tation as given in Heb. ii. — Psalm lxviii. — Christ's ascent above all worlds — 
His raising humanity to higher spheres of being — Beings higher than man 
— Bible presentation of these higher ranks of existences — Nature producing 
beings capable of interfering with nature herself— Science stops with man — 
Man, just evolved from a very low condition, the highest product of a past 
eternal evolution ! — Inconsistency of this — The hideous Hysteron proteron 
— Biblical order — The Logos in the beginning — Idea first — The perfect 
first — Physical order — Matter and force first — The nebula in the beginning 
— All things made by the nebula — The highest in the lowest. Quantitative 
or dynamical, as distinguished from spiritual value : the first the ratio of 
force-being in anything to the amount of force-being in the universe ; the 
second measured by nearness to God the centre of being — Faith, the value 
ascribed to it in the Scriptures as the measure of spiritual worth — Old Tes- 
tament faith compared with heathen virtue — Dictum of Strauss that the 
Hebrews had the personal, the Greeks the absolute idea of Deity — Absurd- 
ity and falseness of this — The absoluteness infinity, timelessness of 
Deity, more powerfully and clearly expressed in the Bible than by Plato — 
Examples — The Divine ubiquity, Psalm cxxxix. — The Infinitely Near, as 
well as the Infinitely Far — The tremendous equilibrium as maintained in 
the Scriptures — Pantheism — The Scripture Pantheism, Acts xvii.— Anthro- 
pathism of the Bible — All revelation of the Infinite to the Finite necessarily 
anthropopathic: not a make-believe accommodation, but a real coming into 
the Finite— The Word, the Reason becoming flesh — Revelations through 
nature, anthropopathic — Scripture equilibrium of apparently opposing 
Divine attributes— God the Universal Power and at the same time a pa- 
trial Deity — No inconsistency — Boldness of the Bible writers — Philosophy 
cannot keep its balance here — Need of more study of the Bible as the 
great defence of faith. 

The greatness of an object of thought is wholly 
relative. So is the attendant conception : so is 

(187) 



1 88 VEDDER LECTURES. 

the emotion it inspires. It is this latter element 
that enters chiefly into the spiritual measure of 
value. In one sense, it may be said that we are 
what we think. In a still truer sense, we are, 
spiritually, what we feel in view of what we think. 
One soul may have a higher feeling of God's 
greatness, in connection with a very limited 
knowledge, than another whose scientific or no- 
tional views extend immensely beyond it. One 
soul may have a more religious emotion, a really 
greater emotion, a higher inspiration from the 
sight of a mountain, than another from the con- 
templation of the starry heavens, or the utmost 
thinkable spaces, and motions, and forces re- 
garded simply in their mathematical interest. 
Thus, as has been already said, but will bear to 
be repeated, David, and Pythagoras, and Socra- 
tes, with their little astronomical knowledge, 
may have had a higher feeling, and, in this sense, 
a really higher view of that highest thing, the 
divine glory, as exhibited in the cosmos, than 
D'Alembert and La Place. The unscientific 
Jonathan Edwards may have felt more in the 
contemplation of the astronomical heavens than 
a Herschel or a Peirce. 

In such estimates as these, a distinction must 
be made, too, between two words often con- 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



189 



founded — a conception* and an idea. In the same 
mind the one may be very small, quantitatively, 
and yet representative of an idea as lofty, as limit- 
less, and as perfect as might exist in connection 
with the highest knowledge. Let me endeavor to 
make this plainer by an illustration : Abraham 
had very little of what may be called astronom- 
ical science. The sky over his head not very far 
off, and a great personal being ruling on earth, 
yet more specially dwelling in the vast unknown 
space that lay above the visible dome ; this was 
his sense-conception when he thought of God, 
his diagram by which he represented Him in 
space, as he was compelled to do if he would 
think of Him at all. It was a very limited con- 
ception, we may say, but, after all, not greatly 
differing from the sense-conception we are now 
compelled to take when we would thus repre- 
sent to ourselves that idea. It was, I say, his 
conceptual diagram, and ours is very much like 
it, though we know, as Abraham probably sus- 



* The word conception is used, not as denoting 1 a mere 
sense-image of God, but that sense-notion of His power, great- 
ness, and other attributes, or that abstracted concept of His 
mode of existence, suggested by our best knowledge. The 
idea is different from this, as being wholly intellectual, wholly 
for the reason, and in that aspect, perfect, though incon- 
ceivable. 



190 VEDDER LECTURES. 

pected, that it was far from filling the measure 
either of the spiritual thought or the spiritual emo- 
tion. There is, however, no reason for doubting 
that the patriarch's idea, in distinction from the 
limited sense imaging his knowledge allowed, 
was as high, as complete, as perfect, in every 
way, as that of Sir William Hamilton. Above 
him and around him lay the infinite, as expressed 
in those three mighty Hebrew words that meet 
us so early in Genesis — those three infinities, Jj$ 
Db"l2> God of eternity, it© Jj$, God Omnipotent, 
\Vb$ b^» God Most YLigh—al(x>vwg, TTavro/cpdrcjp, 
vipiarog — time, space, rank of being — living be- 
yond all duration, strong above all might, high 
above every conceivable altitude of glory and 
dignity. What a contrast between this sublime 
monotheism, and the grotesque horribleness of 
the Assyrian and Babylonian theology, as de- 
ciphered from the exhumed tablets to which our 
attention has been lately called ! And what must 
we think of the criticism that would regard these 
as furnishing the " Editio Princeps," whilst rele- 
gating Genesis to the position of an unauthentic, 
second-hand copy derived from such foul de- 
formities ! It was the same grand patriarchal 
idea expressed by Zophar, the Naamathite, Job 
xi. 7, under similar conceptual representations, 
and challenging comparison with any philo- 



. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. igi 

sophical attempt to set forth the unknowable, 
whether made by a Spencer, a Mansell, or an 
Arnold : 

Eloah's secret, canst thou find it out ? 
Or Shaddai's perfect way, canst thou explore ? 
Higher than Heaven's height, what canst thou do ? 
Deeper than Hades' depths, what canst thou know ? 

Heaven above, and the supposed Hadean deep 
below ; these were the Hebrew conceptual limi- 
tations used to express the illimitable, as they 
were in our Saviour's day, and as they appear in 
His language concerning the doom of Capernaum. 
But the idea itself they are chosen to represent, 
has no sense bounds. The representative figure 
is, in truth, the necessarily finite diagram of 
infinity. 

There is another thought on which I would 
briefly dwell here as introductory to the main 
argument of this lecture, though it has been 
alluded to in Lecture III. The enlarged modern 
knowledge, it is also said, has interfered with the 
old idea of Providence, whether as general or 
particular. We cannot believe in it, especially 
in the latter, as in former days. It is very diffi- 
cult to hold now to any such minute supervision 
of human affairs as might have seemed credible 
for a smaller world. The immense size of the 
cosmos throws into insignificance the destinies 



I92 VEDDER LECTURES. 

both of nations and of individual men. The 
objection, moreover, assumes a philosophic air : 
it claims to be an enlarged view, far more 
grand and lofty than the old religious notion 
as grounded on what it calls the narrow space 
and time conceptions of the Bible. But with 
all its pretension, it is, indeed, a most human 
mode of thinking. It wholly overlooks the 
thought, of all others most important in a re- 
ligious point of view, namely: that in the true 
idea of the Infinite One, there must enter also, 
as the complement of its fulness, the acknowl- 
edgment of the infinitely near as well as of the 
infinitely far and the infinitely high — a thought 
on which we would more fully dwell in a sub- 
sequent part of this lecture, as forming the 
marked distinction between the Biblical and the 
philosophic theism. We can think of but one 
thing at a time. He who transcends this, tran- 
scends it immeasurably. " As the heavens are 
high above the earth, so are my ways above 
your ways, my thinking above your thinking, 
saith the Lord." Vastness of space does not 
tire, innumerableness of objects does not per- 
plex, their infinity does not exhaust : " Have ye 
not known ? have ye not heard, that the ever- 
lasting God, the Creator of the earth," — " He 
who sitteth above the orb of the world,'' y\ft b2 






THE KINGDOM OF GOD. jqj 

y^l^Tl — " fainteth not ; He is never weary ; 
there is no searching of His knowledge ; " " He 
bringeth out His hosts by number ; it is be- 
cause He is strong that not one of them faileth.'' 
" How can God know?" Such is their real' 
language. How can He be present in every 
part, with a knowledge of each thing, as it is, 
without losing for the time, the thought of 
others, or having His attention drawn from the 
great totality, the proper object of the infinite 
mind. This is simply a judgment of the infinite 
by the finite. We think of a great totality, or of 
a great system of causation, as something sep- 
arate from its parts and sequences. We are 
compelled to take things piecemeal, as it were, 
not from the greatness, but the exceeding narrow- 
ness of our finite thinking. The idea of some all- 
embracing intelligence we take on trust as the 
necessary complement to our own deficiency. 
But with God, or a mind we call infinite, all 
effects must be seen in their causes, and there- 
fore, as distinctly known, ever known, without 
any intermittings of knowledge, as the great 
movements, the great causes, or the great totality 
itself. It is astonishing how it can be supposed 
that this difficulty, which comes from the object- 
ors' own poor thinking, can be remedied by that 
exceedingly human and finite idea of machinery, 



194 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



carrying on an original impulse like the turning 
of a crank, or the opening of a valve, and thus 
relieving the original power, and the original in- 
telligence, from all after-supervision or control. 
A semi-conscious plastic nature created by God 
and endowed by Him with exquisite skill, such 
as Cudworth imagined, or Plato's Anima Mundi, 
which is very much the same conception, or a 
view, not obscurely intimated in the Scripture, 
of mighty superhuman beings carrying on the 
movements of God's providence ; these have a 
spiritual dignity, though not unattended with dif- 
ficulties ; but the idea of a dead machinery such 
as we use — trusting all the time to a foreign force 
to carry it on for us — is wholly anthropopathic. 
It is thus indeed that machinery helps us; in as- 
cribing it to the Deity we are measuring Him by 
ourselves, and all our talk of gravity, or of " the 
correlation of forces," fails to relieve the diffi- 
culty. And so we may say in regard to what is 
called a general intelligence. As applied to 
man, it is simply another term for imperfect 
knowledge ; as predicated of Deity, it is without 
meaning. If the universe can do without God 
now, it could have so done without Him in the 
indefinite past. So, too, an absence of the divine 
thought at any time from any part is equivalent 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



'95 



to a failure of that presence always and every- 
where.* 

But let us state the case more familiarly : 
For the sake of the argument, then, the sup- 
position may be made, without objection, that 
the doctrine of providence, to the extent in 
which it appears in the Bible, is not incredible 
when connected with the thought of this being 



* Instead of having any claim to be regarded as an enlarged 
or scientific mode of thinking, there is nothing, in fact, more 
deserving of the name of a vulgar prejudice than the dispo- 
sition to limit the moral grandeur, either of a miracle, or of 
what is called a " particular providence,' 1 by the spatial 
or dynamical littleness of their physical means. The theist 
or theologian, of the Colenso stamp, may do this, but the 
man of science, however sceptical he may be, ought to 
know better than to reason in that way. He understands 
too well that the wonders of the microscope equal, if they 
do not exceed, those of the mere outline masses, or repe- 
titions of masses, which the telescope brings to our view. 
His investigations are constantly leading him to suspect that 
the smallest things lie nearest the secret of life, and that 
the smallest movements, apparently, may be most closely 
connected with the highest workings of the organizations to 
which they belong. Especially is this belittling disposition 
shown, sometimes, in respect to certain miracles recorded 
in the Bible, and that without any regard to the grandeur of 
the moral reasons on which their true credibility so essen- 
tially rests. Thus the theologian above named objects to 
the miracle of the " plague of gnats " as recorded Exod. 
viii. 12, and referred to Ps. cv. 31. It is beneath the dig- 
nity of Deity, he thinks, to suppose Him immediately en- 
gaged in the production of such insignificant creatures as 
these Egyptian kinnim. Now, the language of the account 



Iq6 vedder lectures. 

the onty world, and the human race upon it the 
only class of rational beings aside from God and 
a few spiritual essences, called angels, dwelling 
in some adjacent spheres, atmospherical or aethe- 
real, connected with the earth. On such a scale, 
then, we may regard it as admitted that the 
Scripture ideas of providence, of redemption, 
and the degree of divine care for men that they 



is perfectly consistent with the idea of a purely physical 
process, if there were anything to be gained by such hy- 
pothesis. We know not what physical secrets may lie near 
the surface of nature, ready to manifest themselves suddenly 
when brought into the proper conditions ; as new plants un- 
expectedly make their appearance in an old soil, or new in- 
sects, like our plague of grasshoppers, whose seeds or eggs 
may have lain buried for ages. But, as a miracle proper, what 
has reason to say against it, unless it can allege the absence 
of any higher law, or moral reason for it from the hyperphys- 
ical sphere ? Beneath the dignity of Deity ! But the kinnim 
are made somehow. Their law, therefore, their idea, their 
reason, must have had a spermatic place in the original plan of 
the cosmos. So the scientific theist must say, if he would 
shun the blankest atheism. But the immediate or super- 
natural production of such insignificant creatures ! That is 
the objection. Let us look at it. Why is it more irrational 
than to have provided, billions of ages ago, for their ultimate 
evolution, — to have made a machine, to make a machine, to 
make a machine, and so on, to terminate at last in such a 
result ? Where is the economy ? Where the saving of labor 
or of dignity ? Another element, moral and hyperphysical, the 
element on which we have so much insisted, is to be brought 
in to determine the rationale of either process, general or 
special, according to the higher laws and higher reasons of 
the great divine kingdom. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



I 9 7 



imply, would not be incredible, or beyond the 
very probable bounds of a rational belief. Now, 
suppose another world to be added to our knowl- 
edge, is this credibility diminished, and in the 
inverse ratio ? Suppose two, three, more, to any 
extent ; does the care, the providence, the super- 
vision grow less in the same proportion : one- 
half as much for two worlds, one-third as much 
for three, one-thousandth part for a thousand? 
or does the moral ratio — the moral value — remain 
unchangeable, measured not by a varying universe 
according to a' magnitude real or supposed, but 
by the relation, physical, moral, or spiritual, 
which each part, especially each rational part, 
bears to the immutable God ? Does the meas- 
ure of human sins, and the worth of the human 
soul, thus rise and fall? Bigger in a small world, 
less in a greater, vanishing to an infinitesimal in a 
universe supposed to be immeasurable ? Or must 
we regard each individual world, and each in- 
dividual rationality, as never falling below that 
estimate of moral and spiritual value it would 
have were it alone with God, the only world, 
the only rationality, in infinite space and infinite 
time? To think otherwise, as has been said be- 
fore, is to suffer the lower power of imagination 
to cloud, for a time, the higher faculty of the 
reason; it is to imagine God to be just such a 



I98 VEDDER LECTURES. 

one as ourselves ; it is to sink down to the low 
conclusion that moral ideas, truth, holiness, soul, 
c Deity itself, are but quantitative or mathematical 
notions, having no absolute value, but measured 
on a sliding- scale ever rising and falling with the 
space dimensions of a hypothetical universe. 

The force of this pretentiously philosophic, but 
really anthropopathic view, is supposed to press 
most heavily on the scheme of religion called 
Evangelical, with its leading ideas of atonement 
and redemption.* The universe is too big for 
that. But there is no stopping here. Carry it 
farther, make the cosmos bigger still, and there 
must be a denial of any of that care for men 
which the easier scheme of " Liberal Christian- 
ity" is supposed to allow. Pull out the slide of 
the telescope, and a general providence goes with 
the particular; retribution, moral government of 
any kind, punishment of wrong by any designed 
process, penal or consequential, rewarding of 
virtue either by making it its own reward, or in 
any other way, become as incredible as special 
or general answers to prayer. Human virtues 
and human sins are small affairs, becoming smaller 



* This is a train of thought pursued elsewhere in a note to 
the American edition of the Lange Commentary on Genesis, 
pp. 183, 184. It is introduced here, in an abridged form, as 
appropriate to our present subject. The paragraph devoted 
to it is deemed an essential part of the general argument. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. Igo , 

and smaller with every widening of the physical 
scale. There is no holding on to anything par- 
tial, however large it may seem from our point 
of view. Imagine the universe larger still, and 
the generic begins to share in the diminution. 
Races as well as individuals disappear in the com- 
putation. Particular worlds become too small 
for the divine thought. Carry out the ratio, and 
systems, solar, stellar, nebular, vanish in like 
manner. We are left with a God who has no moral 
attributes, no care for parts of any kind, no thought 
of individuals, no knowledge, in fact, except of 
one vast boundless, indivisible totality. We have 
reached a region where all divine thought, all 
divine knowledge are merged in a mindless blank. 
The conception of totality, too, has vanished ; for 
a real whole, in distinction from a mere all, or 
aggregate mass, cannot be truly thought with- 
out its parts. In our imperfect thinking, we may 
take it on trust from a higher mind without its 
filling up, or we may get an obscure hold of it 
from some dim and exceedingly partial deduc- 
tion from a few parts, by which we leap the vast 
unknown, or supply its chasm by hypothesis. 
But to the Perfect Intelligence, where all things, 
if they appear at all, must appear as they really 
are, and in all their relations, whether universal 
or particular, there cannot be a whole, as a zvhole, 



200 VEDDER LECTURES. 

without a distinct vision, and a distinct thought 
of every part, as a part, in its relation to such 
whole, and to every other part. 

If, however, we admit an ideal change of ratio 
for man as accompanying a supposed enlarge- 
ment of the universe, it will be in a direction the 
opposite of that which the objection seems to re- 
quire. For all things that can be called ends, 
such as are all rationalities, all rational exist- 
ences, whatever may be their physical proportion 
of being, such change, if admitted at all in an ab- 
solute estimate* must be in a ratio direct, instead 
of inverse. The anthropopathic view against 
which we are contending seems to say : Man be- 
comes of less account, — it is less easy to believe 
him to be the subject of a particular providence, 
or of an intense divine care, as a member of an 
immense universe, than when regarded as dwell- 
ing on a lone planet, the only region of life to be 
found in all space. Reason teaches just the con- 
trary. The importance of man as a rational be- 
ing — his spiritual importance, though in itself an 
unchangeable quantity, — is relationally enhanced 
by the greatness, both spatial and numerical, of 
the rational spheres. He is the greater being 
the greater the city of which he is a citizen, and 
as embraced in a scheme of redemption designed 
to raise him to some higher iroXireviia, some higher 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



20] 



sphere. It is more easy to believe that for this 
the Eternal Logos became flesh, that now, 
through this great evolution accomplished in the 
Second Adam, man who had been of the earth 
earthy might be raised to a higher stage of being, 
and made " to sit ev rolg enovpavioig, in the heavenly 
places in Christ Jesus." Which things, says the 
Scriptures, " the angels bend down to look into." 
Thus viewed in its spiritual aspect, the scheme 
of redemption becomes grander, more gloriously 
credible with the expansion of the rational as dis- 
tinguished from the physical universe. The in- 
terpretation which the author of the Epistle to 
the Hebrews gives to that wonderful VIII. Psalm, 
shows that the germ of this idea had, even then, 
its inspiration in the mind of the royal seer. 
This germinal thought was the destined human 
glory as shadowed in the physical inferiority 
itself: " Lord, what is man ! When I survey the 
heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and 
the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man 
that thou rememberest him? What is a son of 
Adam that thou shouldst have regard to him ?" 
It is then, as the Apostle interprets it, there 
comes the thought of a " Son of man," of " one 
made a little lower than the angels for the suffer- 
ing of death, yet crowned with glory and honor." 
Dominion over nature had been given to man at 
9* 



202 VEDDER LECTURES. 

his creation. But he had lost it, in its highest 
spiritual sense ; for nature ruled over him. He 
was the slave of appetite and passion. David 
well knew that. But the " Son of Man," the 
typical humanity, was one in whom the language 
was to receive its highest inspiration. " All 
things," says the Apostle, in seeming contradic- 
tion to the Psalm, "all things were not yet put 
under him;" that is, under the Adamic man; 
" but we see Jesus," one in whom the dominion 
was to be complete ; we see one man, the head 
of a new humanity, and "to whom all power" — 
the highest spiritual rule — " was given in Heaven 
and in earth." Such is the glorious harmony of 
Scripture. It is the same One who is spoken of 
in another Psalm, interpreted in like manner by 
the Apostle, as a conqueror, "ascending up o.i 
high, leading captivity captive," that he might 
receive " gifts for men," and introduce humanity 
itself into the highest spheres of being. Immense 
the rising, as immense had been the descent. 
" Now that he ascended, what is it but that he 
descended first into the lowest parts of the 
earth,' ? Karurepa fieprj rr\q yrjg, the lowest state of 
physical being, the silence, the darkness, the 
immobility of the grave. " He was crucified, 
dead and buried." 

Thence He arose ascending high, 
And showed our feet the way ; 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



203 



"above the heavens," vnepavo), " far above the 
heavens, far above the physical cosmos, to the 
spheres of supernatural and spiritual glory," or, 
as the Bible language gives it, " to the right 
hand of the Most High." " Lift up your heads, 
ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye doors of eter- 
nity, that the King of Glory,'' — dpxiybg rrjg farjs, 
the " Prince-Leader of Life," — " may enter in.'' It 
was that glorious ascension having to human 
sense its beginning here on earth, as His rising 
form faded away from the human eyes so rap- 
turously gazing upon it from the summit of 
the Mount of Olives. We must not explain 
this away into a phantom show, or an unmean- 
ing spirituality. The Scriptures more than in- 
timate that this risen body of Christ transcended, 
in some way, the ordinary conditions of mate- 
rial being in respect to time and space. And 
yet it was a real cosmical transition, though 
to the questions, how, or where, or through what 
spaces, our best conceptions return no answer. 
It may have passed through all spheres, thus 
connecting man as saved and glorified, and 
raised above the physical, with the highest or- 
ders of being, and, through it, manifesting to 
them tt\v ttoXvttolklXov ocxpiav rov Qeov, " the im- 
mensely diversified wisdom of God." Men may 
dispute the truth of such a doctrine, and deny 



204 VEDDER LECTURES. 

its evidence, but they must not say that it 
carries with it a narrowing conception of God's 
cosmical kingdom. The very lowliness of man, 
physically, enhances the spiritual greatness of 
the Bible revelation. When science of herself 
can give us assurance of any such glorious hu- 
man destiny, it may venture to challenge a 
comparison. 

It is this idea of higher orders of being, of 
worlds transcending the physical, and of man's 
eventual connection with them, in which the 
Bible leaves behind it both science and philos- 
ophy. In the space aspect of the trine universe, 
as I have called it, the Bible language falls short 
.of the modern scientific statement as numerically 
expressed, whilst excelling it, even here, in emo- 
tional power. In its time aspect, and time lan- 
guage, it has a conceptive grandeur, to say the 
least, which our decimal notation can never sur- 
pass. In the third dimension, or that of height, or 
rank of being, no scientific view of the cosmos 
comes near to it in spiritual elevation. I have 
already touched upon this dimension, to some 
degree, in treating of the two others. Worlds 
beyond worlds ; that is the space view. Worlds 
after worlds, that is the time conception. Worlds 
above worlds : this is the thought to which the 
Scripture calls us; not in the space relation, 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 205 

where there is really no above and below, but in 
that of rank and spiritual value. Thus we speak, 
and truly speak without a figure, of the moral 
world, or the world of worlds viewed in the 
moral design, as distinct from the mere material 
evolution. Again, there are worlds, so called, 
and properly called, from the kind of beings em- 
braced or the ideas manifested by them — worlds 
intellectual, ideal, artistic, it may be — worlds in- 
effable, transcending both sense and idea — such as 
" eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the human 
heart conceived " — real worlds, yet having no ref- 
erence to space, or correlation in space with other 
worlds, yet filled with a higher order of being — 
worlds hypercosmical, supra-mundane, if such ex- 
pressions do not seem paradoxical ; as where 
Christ says : " I came forth from the Father into 
the cosmos, and again I leave the cosmos and go 
to the Father.' * 

There is nothing in science, indeed, to exclude 
such ideas of higher worlds than the physical 
and material, or of higher and higher orders 
of spiritual being ; but this can be safely said, 
that since the days of Kepler and Newton, the 
course of scientific speculation has not been 
favorable to it. What is called " the Positive 
school," especially, with its many able advo- 
cates, is directly hostile to any such tendencies 



206 VEDDER LECTURES. 

of thought. The reason for this, however, is 
moral rather than scientific. It comes from an 
aversion to the thought of anything superhuman. 
That would be too suggestive of the religious. 
Something higher than man ! the conception 
must be barred out, or it will mount up to a 
higher, and higher, and higher still It cannot 
stop short of a highest, of a comparative su- 
preme, some mighty personalty, having in his 
hand vast control of nature, though produced 
by nature, and thus falling infinitely below the 
true theistic idea of the eternal, the unorigi- 
nated, or the unborn. This thought of a phys- 
ical Titanic god or demon, as a conceivable 
product of the great unknowable force, has al- 
ready been dwelt upon in the First Lecture. 
Here would we apply it to the still more con- 
ceivable hypothesis of superhuman beings, simply 
regarded as transcending our own power of in- 
terference with the physical order. There is 
the possibility — according to the mathematical 
doctrine of time and chances, there is the strong 
probability — that this awful nature, from whose 
eternal play of atoms comes all that is or seems 
to be ? may have produced such beings, im- 
mensely superior to man, and yet with no se- 
curity drawn from any possible knowledge of 
nature herself, that they may not be beings of 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 2 0J 

inconceivable malignity. Physical science has 
no a priori law or idea demanding that the 
atoms shall produce a good and benevolent, 
rather than an evil and a hating consciousness. 
It may be, too, a being or beings capable of 
interfering with Nature herself; as in the awful 
imagining of Milton : 

" Gnawing their mother's bowels ; when they list, 
To the womb returning, — hourly thus conceived, 
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite." 

For according to the hypothesis against which 
we are contending, or the unqualified evolution 
scheme, nature has produced, in man, such a 
being capable of interfering with nature to a 
vast extent, of deflecting it from its course, or 
of making it do what, if left to itself, it would 
not have done. Now whether we call it the 
supernatural or not, there is nothing in the way 
of conceiving it as belonging to mightier beings 
evolved from this unknown fearful womb, — and 
to mightier still, and mightier still, as far as 
the utmost effort of our science-aiding imagin- 
ation can carry the appalling idea. Thus science 
may have to admit the miraculous, or, not to 
dispute about names, the mirabilia, the things 
beyond our utmost sense, our utmost induction, 
stupendous wonders as judged by Hume's rule, 



208 VEDDER LECTURES. 

— in other words, phenomena depending on an 
unknown personal interfering will, far out of 
any traceable chain of impersonal physical se- 
quences. It is these sense-transcending mirabilia, 
this thought of appalling personal interferences, 
which the infidel science would exclude from 
the cosmical being. But here they are again, 
in spite of " the Positive Philosophy " and on 
the very hypothesis that seems to exclude them. 
Here they are again, without the unoriginated 
I AM, the unborn God of Love and Reason, to 
shield us from their malignant power. 

I have dwelt on this, digressively, to show that 
the very inconsistencies into which the system 
of unqualified evolution is compelled to run, in 
its denial of the higher being, prove the strong 
aversion of its adherents to the thought of any 
personalities above the human having been, as 
yet, evolved from nature, or that primal nebular 
substance in which all things have been lying 
potentially from the beginning. But be the 
cause what it may, the fact is undeniable. The 
scientific form of infidelity is inclined to stop 
with man. It would, perhaps, admit any amount 
of mere physical being as occupying the space 
universe ; but rational being, if elsewhere exist- 
ing, is essentially a repetition, in rank at least, 
whatever diversity there may be in form, of our 






THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 209 

earthly homo. Here they are the narrow think- 
ers ; they are the ones who make earth the 
centre, or our own sphere of being the central 
sphere in dignity, if not the space centre of the 
universe. 

How immensely does the Bible transcend this ! 
How much more expanding as well as elevating 
its view ! For here our discussion has reference 
mainly to this charge against the teachings of 
the Scriptures, that they narrow the mind, and 
that, in this respect, modern science has out- 
grown religious faith. The Bible does not, in- 
deed, give us imaginative or descriptive detail, 
but it most vividly sets forth this altitude dimen- 
sion of the universe, or of universal being. It 
transcends any view which would give it simply 
duration in time, or an endlessly expanding evo- 
lution in space — making it a mathematical uni- 
verse, an immeasurable series of motions, a limit- 
less play of correlated forces, an endless repetition 
of elemental phenomena — immense length and 
breadth, we may call it, with a lack of height, or 
an almost infinitesimal thinness, as compared with 
the idea germinant in all religious thought, and 
which the Christian Scriptures so wonderfully 
confirm and expand. The Bible, both Old and 
New, places God in the empyrean. He is de- 
scribed as " inhabiting the high and holy place," 



2io VEDDER LECTURES. 

transcending in rank, immeasurably separate in 
moral purity ; the heavens are not clean before 
Him. $«c oIk&v dnpooLrov ; He dwells in light 
unapproachable. His name is the Most High. 
He rules over the kingdom of all eternities, of all 
worlds, in time, in space, in rank of being. It is 
a spiritual as well as a physical kingdom — the 
latter subordinate to, and deriving its value from, 
the first. This kingdom contains countless ranks 
of being far below Deity, yet still many of them 
transcending man. The names given to them 
are not to enlarge our scientific insight, but simply 
to denote superlative excellence and power: 
Angels, Archangels, Seraphim, or burning ones, 
Kedoshim, or holy ones, Bene Elohim, Sons of 
God, Morning Stars, Thrones, Dominions, Princi- 
palities, and Powers. Immense the range, incon- 
ceivable the height in this upper direction. 
The more exalted their rank, the more occupied 
are they with the glory and adoration of their 
still infinitely transcending Maker : 

To Thee, Cherubim and Seraphim 
Continually do cry. 

Again there are orders of being that may be con- 
ceived of as more nearly related to earth, and 
the lower physical being. There are references 
to cosmical powers of this kind of which science 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 2 II 

has nothing, and can have nothing, to say, either 
by way of proof or disproof. They are set forth 
in the Bible as God's ministers ruling in the ele- 
ments, having an invisible elementary organiza- 
tion, yet exercising power over nature as man does ; 
doing things which are not miraculous in their 
sphere, however they may be regarded in ours. 
The angels of the Egyptian plagues, the angel of 
the pestilence in Israel, the mighty power that 
smote the Assyrian host, belong to this class. 
They deal with the interiora of nature, the springs 
of nature, lying far down below our deepest 
science, the keenest search of our chemical 
analysis, the most penetrating gaze of our micro- 
scopes. On the pages of revelation the " curtain 
of the dark " is sometimes drawn aside, and these 
powers are symbolically exposed to view; but 
how often, in the history of the world, may be 
ascribed to such unseen agencies as these, events 
that so puzzle, as they are now puzzling, our best 
science ! New diseases, sudden and strange in 
their form, ever and anon invade the world ; in- 
explicable phenomena present themselves. Don't 
be afraid, is the cry ; it is indeed hard to explain, 
if it be not jugglery and delusion ; but even if 
real, it is still law ; it is all law somewhere, and 
that comforts us, that magic word so much more 
tolerable than the idea of a near personal God, or 



212 VEDDER LECTURES. 

the near presence of any of His more immediate 
ministers. AH law doubtless, even as man's 
operations in nature may be said to be in accord- 
ance with natural processes on the nearer surface ; 
but who or what wields the power of law in these 
deep interior stages, or these more hidden 
springs? Our scientific conventions take up the 
matter; they begin to trace some of the plainer 
sequences. They get hold of a few of the nearer 
links ; and lo, another form appears, or some other 
inexplicable manifestations present themselves. 
All law doubtless, but how does that reiteration 
help the matter in cases where we stand in most 
pressing need of help, whilst medical science, 
and all science, instead of its usual vaunting, can 
only confess its incompetency ? The same 
thought is suggested by what may be called 
seemingly abrupt transitions in nature — some re- 
vealed by geology, others occasionally present- 
ing themselves in nearer historical manifestations. 
The clock strikes a new hour ; we are startled 
for a moment ; but soon comes the comfort 
again: there is a law for it somewhere; there 
are no leaps in nature. True, but what has 
made the connection? There may have been, 
as has been intimated in a former lecture, cogs 
and wheels far below where science sees ; law 
has been going on in the silent approach of these 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



213 



in that awful depth, or there may be unseen 
powerful beings that by means of other natural 
forces have hastened the momentous contact. 
These may be ministers of God, or, take the pure 
evolution scheme, they may be of nature's own 
evolving, entering into the bowels of their parent, 
as has been said, or interfering with nature even 
as her younger child man has derived from her a 
power thus to interfere. The juxtaposition of 
atoms have made our consciousness, our thought, 
our will, our strength, our power to interfere 
with the all-breeding parent ; why may not a 
congeries of higher and more ethereal atoms have 
somewhere and somehow produced a higher con- 
sciousness, a more energetic will, a mightier 
strength for analogous purposes, and still mightier 
and more science-baffling effects ? I may refer 
here to the phenomena now predominant in what 
is called spiritualism, but which have manifested 
themselves in other ages and from the earliest 
times. The evidence has so accumulated, that 
the easy talk about the imagination and " uncon- 
scious cerebration," and the power of sympathy, 
has become stale. That there is a high measure 
of reality here can be no more doubted than 
some of the positions of science itself, as based on 
similar evidence. Equally clear to a sane relig- 
ious mind is the proof that it is an evil as well 



214 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



as a very ancient thing-. Its defenders adopt the 
common style; they, too, babble of "law," and 
show a like tendency to include all things in a 
godless physical system. In reference, however, 
to our present argument, there is need only to 
insist on the fact of its wholly baffling the positive 
irreligious science ; and I would only remark, 
once for all, that when I seem to speak harshly 
of science anywhere in these lectures, I mean no 
other. Here, however, it is enough to maintain 
that no science can deny, any more than it can 
affirm, the possibility of aerial and aethereal ex- 
istences, good or bad. There may be organiza- 
tions transcending the utmost ken of the micro- 
scope or the laboratory, and yet as real as any- 
thing visible on earth — personal beings, benevo- 
lent or malignant, having control over the 
electric, magnetic, or odic forces, call them what 
you will, or themselves connected with them as 
correlated organic agencies. There is something 
very significant in the name the Scriptures give 
to some of these powers, whose existence it un- 
hesitatingly assumes. It calls them Koofionp&Topag 
rov gkotovc rov al&voq rovrov " the cosmical 
powers of the darkness of this world," aeon, or 
sphere — the unseen agents that rule in the dark 
world of nature, and who are also parties in the 
moral conflict in which the Christian is called to 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



215 



wrestle, Eph. vi. 12. In Eph. ii. 2, they are 
called e^ovolai rov dspog, " the powers of the air," 
whether the term refers to the nearer surround- 
ing atmosphere, or to the space-filling aether, a 
notion which the ancient mind, both philo- 
sophical and poetical, clearly recognized, and 
which modern science is rapidly confirming. 

But turn we now to the higher regions of 
cosmical and spiritual being, and the higher 
beings before referred to as named by Paul in 
his glorious nomenclature, from whatever source 
derived : Angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, 
principalities, and powers. Immeasurable height ! 
And yet above all these did Christ ascend when 
He "left the cosmos," and "returned to the 
Father, to the glory which he had with Him 
before the cosmos was." A narrow conception, 
shall we call it, this sublime scale of being, and 
that high destiny to which men are called 
through the mediation of the uncreated Logos! 
Place it in contrast with that well-known view 
of the positive philosophy which makes man the 
etre supreme, the highest order of being the 
infinite evolution has yet reached after an ante- 
past eternity of working. Not man redeemed 
by Christ, not civilized man, even, with all the 
animality and vice to which we give that name, 
but man as he was only a short time ago in 



2i6 VEDDER LECTURES. 

the evolution chronology, when he first devel- 
oped a thumb, and began to walk erect, though 
still a prognathian troglodyte surrounded by 
stone implements and gnawed bones — the Strauss- 
ian or Hegelian man, in whom the universal 
force, the hitherto undeveloped cosmical soul, 
was just emerging into consciousness. Think of it ! 
An endless evolution, an eternal working, an infi- 
nite causation, and yet an effect so finite. Nature 
has been working upward from eternity, and 
has just passed the long-armed ape who begat 
Prognathus, as Prognathus begat the troglodyte 
homo. What becomes of our doctrine of 
progress? As sure as mathematics, it should 
have been all evolved, all that we now have, 
over and over again, — all out, or far more of it 
out than has come out, incalculable ages ago. 
An eternal ante-past of progressive working ' 
To what a height should it have arisen ! It 
should have transcended all our ideals. The 
most exalted finite being should have been 
reached, the most exalted that our minds can 
conceive, instead of this creature man, so poor, 
so low ; lor my hearers will bear in mind that I 
am speaking of him as measured by no higher 
scale of value than that afforded by this physical 
hypothesis,- man evolved from nebular gas — 
man just coming out of darkness and so soon to 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



217 



return to darkness again — e tenebris in tenebras — 
man just stepping above the ape, or just emerg- 
ing from the fungus, and having nothing to 
secure him against speedily returning to nothing- 
ness, or becoming manure to the fungus that* 
succeeds. 

This all comes from that hideous vorepov npo- 
repov, that inversion of all necessary thinking 
referred to in the quotation from Aristotle, Lect. 
Third. Nature first, it says, matter first, an im- 
palpable nebulous nihilism first, the lowest and 
most imperfect first ; life, thought, reason, idea, 
their junior* products, and God, therefore, the 
last product, if there be a God at all, or anything 
to which such a name can possibly be given. 
And we are asked to adopt this, and call it 
grand, whilst rejecting as narrow and soul-con- 
tracting the Revelation which makes God first, 
reason first, idea first, the perfect first, — as 
has been said before — the imperfect and the 
finite ever a departure from it, whether in the 
scale of order or of time, whether as exhibited in' 
processes of lapse and deterioration, or the con- 
trary seeming of recovery and restoration in 
cyclical rounds. The two schemes have two 
entirely different modes of speech. Says the 
mere physical hypothesis : In the beginning was 
the nebula, and all things were in the nebula, 
10 



2i8 VEDDER LECTURES. 

and all things were self-evolved from the nebula 
— even life, thought, consciousness, idea, reason 
itself, having no other source. The other speaks 
to us in language like this: Ev dpxq rjv 6 Aoyoq, 
" In the beginning was the Word,'' the Aoyoq, the 
Reason, " and the Word was with God, and the 
Word was God. All things came into being 
by Him. In Him was life," Zwfj, and "from this 
life ,; — not from motions, or molecules, or cor- 
related forces, or the vibration of fibres, or the 
arrangements of nebular atoms, but from this life 
of the Logos, the eternal reason — " came the 
light of men " — the mind, reason, conscience of 
humanity, — even " the light that lighteth '' every 
rational being, " coming into the comos." St. 
John and Herbert Spencer! This human light 
itself shall judge between them, and we need 
have no fears for the ultimate decision. But let us 
hear more of this magnificent style of language : 
" Who is the image of the unseen God, the First 
Born before all creation, the impress of His 
substance : because in Him were created all 
things, — things in the heavens, and things upon 
the earth, things seen, and things unseen,'' — 
things of the sense world, and things transcend- 
ing sense — all ranks of being, " whether they be 
thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers, 
— all things were by Him, and for Him, and in 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



219 



Him all things consist, ovveoTTjice, or stand tog-e- 
ther " — in Him the Logos, the reason, the idea, 
the wisdom, the eternal and "only begotten Son 
of God." This is the narrow view ; this is the 
order of things we are asked to give up, that our 
minds may be enlarged by the more lofty method 
of science in its wholly hypothetical scheme of 
the universe, — a science which puts the nebula 
" in the beginning," and makes man, the ape- 
evolved man, the highest product that has yet 
been produced from a past eternity of progress. 

There is a tendency, even among some who 
believe the Scriptures, to depopulate the vast in- 
terval between the human and the divine, leaving 
it an immeasurable blank, or a few angels, per- 
haps, who fly about the only inhabitants of the 
vqjd. But this overlooks the sublime signifi- 
cance of the Bible language. The reason for it, 
however, easily suggests itself: The ascending 
view seems to impair the dignity of man as the 
subject of so great a redemption. But this is 
all changed when we come to regard that re- 
demption itself as the lifting up of man into a 
higher sphere of being, and the rescuing him 
from that sinking into nature through which he 
tends to the level of all below, or to the lowest 
forms of a demonic animality. 

The other idea proceeds, moreover, from a 



220 VEDDER LECTURES. 

false conception of dignity or moral worth. It 
confounds two totally different modes of estimat- 
ing value, the spiritual and the physical — the quan- 
titative or the dynamical, as compared with the 
estimate of faith, or nearness of relation in which 
the finite being, however small, physically, may 
stand to the infinite centre of all being. In the 
one aspect, the value of any individual part sinks 
in the proportion which its total capacity of being 
bears to the whole of physical existence. The uni- 
verse, not God, is the sponsor and index of value. 
The bigger the universe, the less are human sins, 
the less the human worth. It is, as before inti- 
mated, a variable quantity, which, when this ratio 
is carried out, becomes an infinitesimal. When 
measured by the other scale, it is a constant quan- 
tity, unchangeable in itself, whilst, in this cen- 
tral faith relation, it may even be said that, instead 
of sinking, it truly rises, and that too in the direct 
ratio of the greatness of the universe considered 
as entering into the greatness of the Creator. In 
other words, the more glorious the universe in 
all the aspects mentioned, and especially in that 
of ascending ranks of being, the greater is man 
in this moral aspect, that is, when regarded as a 
rational, conscious participant and contemplator 
of this glory. " All things are yours ; for ye are 
Christ's, and Christ is God's." If so be there are 



THE KIXGDOM OF GOD. 2 2I 

immense degrees above him, th3 higher is his 
own value as one rejoicing in it, and thus losing 
himself, as it were, in an adoring view of Him, 
by whom, and through whom, and for whom are 
all things. The lower the vale, physically, from 
which this rational, conscious contemplator looks 
up, the more beautiful and serene the heavens 
above, the more sublime the idea of the Supernal 
One sedentis eternitatem, " inhabiting eternity" 
11 dwelling in the high and holy place, with Him 
also" — O immeasurable contrast ! — with him also 
" who is humble and contrite in spirit, and who 
trem le h t my word." 

Physical or quantitative value, as I have called 
it, is numerical or mathematical. It has a fixed 
summation in decimals, if we could find room in 
which to put them. It is quantitative, therefore, 
in distinction from that transcendental calculus 
which no arithmetical summing, no algebraic 
equation, no fluxional series can ever state. It 
is this moral nearness to God, as distinguished 
from such quantitative relation to the universe, 
which is so pathetically represented in the Scrip- 
tures. Man, as a rational being, is allied to the 
divine; the imaged likeness, though frightfully 
deformed, is still discernible to the all-seeing Eye ; 
God recognizes this distant relationship as He 
sees him lying in spiritual ruin, and then, when 



222 VEDDER LECTURES. 

he believes, the distance is gone ; it is his 
faith which brings him near to the Infinite One, 
and makes him, in some sense, a partaker of His 
infinity. This is his value. Hence the power 
of that glorious scriptural anthropopathism : The 
Almighty Shepherd leaving the ninety and nine 
to seek the one that is lost in the wilderness. 
Hence it is that the ranks of ascending being, 
who are represented as standing before the face 
of our heavenly Father, rejoice over the sinner, 
the one sinner, that returns from his straying, and 
through faith in God becomes united to that 
higher fold, that higher spiritual sphere tran- 
scending all the spheres of force and nature. 

In his mere physical aspect, man is, indeed, 
allied to the lowest things. Science, in tracing 
him through the inferior animal types, does rrot 
present this lowly aspect more emphatically than 
is done in the language of Abraham : " Who am 
but dust and ashes ;" or in the moaning of Job, 
when he had lost his sense of the divine com- 
munion, the link that bound him to the Eternal, 
and having in itself " the power of an endless 
life" : " I said to corruption, thou art my father ; to 
the worm, thou art my mother and my sister." It 
is something more than a mere despairing ejacu- 
lation. In his physical being, " as ol the earth 
earthy,'' man is, indeed, allied to all below, as in 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 2 2$ 

Christ he becomes allied to all above. And this 
suggests the thought whether the lower creation 
may not rise with him in some proportional 
ascent? Scripture encourages the idea. The 
KTioig, the creation, " the creature, groans with 
man." It is " waiting " in mute hopefulness, ovv 
d-ottapadoKia, with bended head, with forward- 
gazing eye, with outstretched neck, as the pic- 
torial word implies, with longing expectation, 
elg ttjv d~ofidXvipiv r&v vi&v rov Oeov, "for the reve- 
lation of the sons of God." It is thus, too, we 
see what grandeur links itself with this human 
lowliness in the cheering language of the Pro- 
phet : " Fear not, thou worm, Jacob, for it is I 
who have redeemed thee ; I hold thee by thy 
hand, I call thee by thy name ; thou art mine." 
" Fear not ; only believe." " For I am per- 
suaded," says the rapt Apostle, " that neither 
death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
powers, nor things present, nor things to come, 
nor height, nor depth, nor any thing created, 
shall be able to separate us from the love of Goi 
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." What won- 
drous ideas are these ! So new to the world ! 
new to any phase of its speculative theosophy, 
newer still as a living emotional human utter- 
ance ! " The love of God" — the love of God in 
Christ Jesus the Incarnate Redeemer — " the love 



224 VEDDER LECTURES. 

of God that passeth knowledge ! " That heavenly 
strain; whence came it ? That superhuman flash 
of glory ; from what philosophy, Greek, Latin, 
Egyptian, Chaldsean, Persian, Hindu, was it ever 
developed ? All space, all time, all rank of being 
— the universe in its trine aspect — all is here. 
Science shrinks from the mighty declaration : 
" Nor height, nor depth," no power of the cosmos, 
either in its altitude or its profundity, can separate 
from God, or affect the estimate of souls that truly 
believe. Here, we say, is glory. But the infidel 
philosophy cannot see it. " Its eyes are holden." 
Extent in space, dynamical change, duration, 
motion, physical evolution, endless repetition of 
material being — these fill its range of vision. The 
height and depth of the spiritual universe, or as 
manifested in the glory of God ; these are ideas 
which its inductions ever fail to reach. 

So is it to a great extent in the literary world. 
The sublimest Bible truths are unknown. The 
organ for their discovery is not wholly lacking, 
but the frivolousness of the predominant sense- 
philosophy prevents their true appreciation. The 
mere litterateursees nothing in passages which to 
the believer are full of glory, whilst things not 
worthy to be named in comparison from classic, 
Brahminic, or Confucian writings, call out raptur- 
ous expressions of admiration. The Bible is full 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



225 



of anthropomorphisms, they say. How offensive 
to their spiritual tastes are Hebrew gnats, whilst 
swallowing, without the least difficulty, the most 
monstrous of Hindu elephants and the most 
deformed of Assyrian camels ! And yet to the 
devout student of the Scriptures, even the por- 
tions over which the careless worldly reader is 
most apt to stumble, are full of evidence that 
they are from an earth-transcending sphere of 
thought. Many have been thus stumbled, per- 
haps, on reading the glowing eulogy of the Old 
Testament believers as contained in the eleventh 
chapter of Hebrews, — or the long record of the 
men " who pleased God" because they had that 
thing " without which it is impossible to please 
Him," even their faith. They wonder that the 
writer should speak in this manner " of Gideon, 
and of Barak, of Jephthah, of Samuel, also, and 
of David." What was there in these uncultivated 
semi-barbarians that they should be pointed out 
as favorites of Deity, or as men " of whom the 
world was not worthy." To the Bible-taught 
soul the answer comes with an unearthly light 
and power : " They believed God," says the 
record ; " they endured as seeing Him who is 
invisible." It is the trait which most allures the 
spiritual eye in those grand old patriarchal 
figures, so uncultivated, as some would say. In 
10* 



226 VEDDER LECTURES. 

their unfaltering trust, they confessed themselves 
to be " strangers and pilgrims on the earth ; they 
were looking for a better country, seeking for 
something stable, ' even a city which had foun- 
dations.' " They had that gem of faith shining 
far up in the highest heavens, and more precious 
in the sight of God, even when seen in the heart of 
an old Hebrew warrior, like Gideon or Jephthah, 
than all the philosophy of Plato, and all the pre- 
tentious ethics of an Epictetus, a Seneca, or an 
Antonine. 

It was the saving faith of Samuel, of David, 
and those other rude old Hebrew men, so differ- 
ent from that which has been invented, and some- 
times on the most untenable grounds, for what 
are called u heathen worthies." The belief in the 
salvation of Socrates, it has been said, stands on 
the same footing with our belief in that of Noah, 
Moses, David, or other Old Testament saints, so 
called, who died before the coming of Christ. 
But it is ignorance of the Bible alone that can 
confound the cases. The faith of these Old Tes- 
tament men was ever a belief in a righteousness 
out of, and higher than, themselves. It was to 
this they clung, whatever the message, rite, or 
symbol by which it was represented. It was ever 
a righteousness of God's own providing. I will 
yield to no one in due reverence for Socrates. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



227 



But could I find that for which I have earnestly 
searched among his best utterances, any hearty 
confession of sin, any self-condemning humility 
aside from his frequent ironical disclaimer of 
Knowledge, anj^thing like the prayer of David or 
the Publican, any confession like that of Job, 
when, renouncing his own unsatisfying argu- 
ments, he falls upon his face and says, " I repent 
in dust and ashes," — any language of deep self- 
distrust, any recognition, in short, of any the 
least need of a righteousness higher and holier 
than his own — could I discover any trace of these, 
I could draw from it more hope of his salvation, 
in Christ's sense of the word, than from all the 
fine sayings that have ever been truly or igno- 
rantly ascribed to this noblest of the heathen, this 
prince of all the philosophers. " The heavens 
are not clean in Thy sight ; Thou art of purer eyes 
than to look upon evil ; Thou desirest truth in 
the hidden parts ; O wash Thou me, and then 
shall I be clean ; when Thou shalt judge me, 
then shall I be whiter than snow ; a broken heart, 
O God, Thou wilt not reject ; search me, O God, 
and try me ; explore me, and see if there be any 
evil way in me, and lead me in the way everlast- 
ing ; I will make mention of Thy righteousness, 
Thine only ; for with Thee is the fountain of life, 
and in Thy light do we see light " When we 



228 VEDDER LECTURES. 

can find anything like these utterances in 
Socrates, or Epictetus, in Seneca, in Antonine, 
in Confucius, in the Zend-avesta, or in the Vedas, 
then may we have some charitable respect for the 
parallels which certain literary men are so fond 
of drawing. Sublime examples for our argument 
are still more abundant in the New Testament, 
but, for obvious reasons, it was thought best here, 
and in citations to follow, to keep in view chiefly 
the earlier revelation. 

"Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned." Hunt 
through all the dialogues of Plato, hunt through 
all the Vedas for anything like that. Sin as 
against God, against God alone ; Socrates knew 
nothing of it. It is an idea hardly to be found in 
the classical Greek literature. The Grecian sage 
acknowledged a war in the soul ; the lower had 
got above the upper. It was a civil war, de- 
structive of all good. That he saw clearly. The 
disordered spirit he would compose and recon- 
struct, but he would do it by philosophy. He 
would make peace between the reason and 
the appetite. He would put to sleep the wild 
beasts, or chain them up, or set them in balancing 
antagonism one against the other. But he could 
not "cast them out." That could only be done 
by prayer, and fasting, and penitent confession 
that acknowledges sin to be in the centre of the 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



229 



soul, and seeks peace there by first seeking peace 
with God. It was the primal defect of the Pla- 
tonic or Socratic thinking, that it made matter 
the original evil, and laid all our sins upon the 
wretched sympathising body. Of that older war 
between God and the spirit, of which the Scrip- 
tures are so full, Socrates knew nothing. The 
Psalmist, too, was acquainted with this strife be- 
tween appetite and the reason ; but he found not 
the cure in philosophy. " Unite my heart," he 
prays (Psalm lxxxvi.), make one my divided heart, 
as it literally reads, " to fear thy name" How 
deeply Paul felt this inward strife we learn from 
that wondrous seventh chapter of Romans, and 
we know, too, his only remedy, " O wretched 
man, who shall deliver me? I thank God 
through Jesus Christ my Lord." " Let him lay 
hold of my strength that he may make peace 
with me, make peace with me" as the Prophet so 
tenderly repeats it. 

" Our modern monotheistic conception of 
God," says Strauss, " has two sides, the absolute 
and the personal." "The first element," he pro- 
ceeds to say, " is Greek," — that is, we derive it 
from the Greeks ; " the second comes from the 
Hebrew Christian sources." The distinction 
between the Greek and Hebrew conception, such 
a favorite with Strauss and others, is a mere 



230 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



tinsel antithesis, having a false show of learning, 
but without any real foundation. Especially i<= it 
false on the Hebrew side. The personal in Deity 
is indeed set forth in the Scriptures with awful 
distinctness, but in no writings is the absolute, 
the infinite, the unconditioned, the knowledge- 
surpassing, the time-and-space-transcending as- 
pect of the divine character more sublimely 
presented : " The I am that I AM, the '0 D.N, The 
Being pre-eminently, who IS and WAS, and IS TO 
COME, and whom no tense form can adequately 
describe — the one — the all — " who filleth all 
things," " who inhabits eternity," " of whom 
there is no similitude," with whom "one day is as 
a thousand years, and a thousand years as one 
day," whose " ways transcend our ways, and 
whose thinking is above our thinking, even as 
the heavens, the infinite heavens, are higher than 
the earth." Where do we find anything like this 
in Plato or Aristotle ? For Strauss must have 
reference to the Greek philosophers rather than 
to the intensely personal conceptions of the poets. 
Where do we find anything in any of the Greek 
schools which so sets forth the absoluteness, the 
eternity, the infinity, the incomprehensibleness of 
the divine character? It does not detract from 
this, that such representations of the timeless 
absoluteness are sometimes made through the 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 23 I 

most vivid sense-picturings, though there are 
other cases, and equally sublime, where the gen- 
eral or abstract forms of speech are used. 

It is so, also, in regard to conceptive power. 
This has already been alluded to in what was said 
of the old names in Genesis, and the comparison 
between the ancient and the modern sense-imag- 
ing accompanying those terms. God does not 
seem, after all, much higher to the modern as- 
tronomer than he did to Abraham. No figure of 
immutability surpasses that of the Hebrew ^y \jty> 
inhabitans eternitatem, "inhabiting eternity" — 
filling the changeless totality of being ; or, as 
Boethius expresses it, tota simul et interminabilis 
vitae possessio. So also the representations of the 
divine unknowableness to which reference has 
already been made. Again, God's mighty har- 
monizing power — "the reign of law " — which he 
has established throughout the worlds, and the 
Scripture mode of expressing it, as set forth in 
Lecture Third. There is no show of philosophiz- 
ing ; no assuming to speak the language of any 
science. It may be said, perhaps, that there is 
an attempt here to get more out of this style of 
speaking than the words will warrant ; but it 
cannot fail to be seen and felt how directly it car- 
ries the mind to the ultimate causal ideas, and 
causal forces, be they what they may. 



232 VEDDER LECTURES. 

Take again those attributes which, though 
physical in their manifestation, are connected 
with the moral aspect of the Divine, — the ideas 
of providence and omnipresence. How won- 
derfully are these brought together, in one pic- 
ture, the near and the far, the intimate person- 
ality and the unconditioned absoluteness of 
Deity ! We have a remarkable example in the 
CXXXIX. Psalm ; the loftiest co ceptual ex- 
pression of the space-filling presence followed 
immediately by language denoting the closest 
personal familiarity with the finite human soul : 
" Whither shall I go from Thy spirit, or w^ ere 
shall I flee from Thy presence ? If I ascend to 
the heavens, Thou art there; if I make my bed 
in Sheol, behold Thou art there ; let me take the 
wings of the morning and dwell in thj uttermost 
West; even there Thy hand shall guiJ.e me; 
Thy right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, 
let darkness bury me, the night shall be light 
about me. No darkness hides from Thee ; the 
night shineth as the day ; the darkness 's as the 
light." All philosophical and scientific language 
is ultimately grounded on figures ; but what 
figures for the soul can telescope the remote 
more powerfully than these ? And, then, in al- 
most immediate sequence, the ineffable nearness : 
" For Thou dost possess my reins ; Thou didst 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



233 



overshadow me in my mother's womb. How 
precious are Thy thoughts of me, O God, how 
great their sum ! When I awake I am still 
with Thee." It is as though the soul that thus 
apprehends the Infinite by faith did, in some 
way, partake of God's ubiquity. In heaven 
above, in Hades deep below, in all conceivable 
spaces that lie between the remotest East, where 
morning begins its flight, and the uttermost 
parts of the boundless sea, the conceptual limit 
of the illimitable West, — wherever Thou art, 
there " am I still with Thee, — still with Thee 
— evermore with Thee." And so in the time 
aspect. God's eternal thought transcends dura- 
tion and succession. The longest as well as 
the shortest intervals disappear before the time- 
less contemplation ; as in the language already 
quoted from the Psalmist and the Apostle : " A 
thousand years ; '' it is numerically finite, even as 
one day or a watch in the night ; but concep- 
tually it is a symbol of eternity, of a timeless eter- 
nity. The thousand years represent the idea as 
well as the longest row of decimals. It is simply 
the most vivid way of setting forth the ab- 
solute timelessness of God's being except as 
He chooses to manifest Himself in the flow 
of the finite. Talk of the Greeks, and their 
superiority to the Hebrews in respect to 



234 



VEDDER LECTURES. 



this idea of the Divine absoluteness ! what, as 
compared with the Psalmist's language, is Plato's 
labored effort in the Timaeus to give us the 
difference between aldv, the immovable eternity, 
and XP° V0 $, or time, its revolving mirror. Indeed, 
the human mind must ever fail to grasp the idea 
of timelessness, but no language can carry our 
thought higher or farther in that direction than the 
solemn musing of this old XC. Psalm : " A thou- 
sand years in Thine eyes as yesterday when it is 
past, and as a watch in the night ! " The wings 
of Plato's abstractions grow weary in every at- 
tempt to soar to such a height. Compare, too, 
the effort of the same philosopher to set before 
us his much-labored distinction between the ra 
ovra and the yiyv6[j,eva t the absolute and the flow- 
ing, the opara and the dopara, the visible and the in- 
visible, the diodrjra and the votjto,, the sense world 
and the world of ideal or necessary truth. Great 
as that is, compare it all, I say, with that short 
soaring sentence of Paul, the Hebrew of the 
Hebrews : " For the things that are seen are tem- 
poral (TrpoGKaipa), they belong to time ; the things 
unseen are eternal." Or go back to the older 
Hebrew prophet, the cotemporary and the min- 
ister of King Hezekiah : " Lift up your eyes to 
the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath ; 
for the heavens shall dissolve like vapor, and the 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



235 



earth shall wear out like a garment; but MY SAL- 
VATION shall be for eternity, and MY RIGHTEOUS- 
NESS (my moral kingdom) shall never fail." Take 
it in connection with the near language of the 
railing Rabshakeh, which now so repeats itself, 
in all its bald sameness, everywhere on the As- 
syrian tablets. What must we think of those 
who talk of these monuments as shedding light 
upon the Bible, or of the ideas it derives from 
them, or from the kindred Egyptian darkness. 
To a serious intelligence the conviction is irre- 
sistible that there was something unearthly in 
those Hebrew books, as distinguished from the 
literature of all cotemporaneous surrounding 
nations, and that this fact furnishes an unanswer- 
able argument for their inspiration and unearthly 
origin. 

And yet such is the nature of this vivid Hebrew 
style, that, whilst it rises beyond all philosophizing, 
the child can feel, and, in that feeling understand, 
its lofty meaning. It elevates the soul while it 
sets it pondering ; calls out the contemplative 
spirit, showing the truth of that pregnant Scrip- 
tural declaration : " The entrance of Thy word 
giveth light." It quickens the intelligence 
through the awed emotion : " it giveth under- 
standing to the simple." At the earliest dawning 
of the youthful intelligence should the grand Old 



236 VEDDER LECTURES. 

Testament ideas, and this sublime Old Testament 
language, be made as familiar to it as possible. 
It is, indeed, above them, but that is no reason for 
making it stand aside. Trust the power of God's 
word for lifting up the youngest minds to some 
good measure of its comprehension. 

It is astonishing how ignorantly some of uor 
literary men will talk of the narrowness of the 
Old Testament, and the lowering conceptions it 
presents of Jehovah as an earthly and patrial 
Deity, — as a God bloody, vindictive, jealous, in 
the human sense, narrowly competing for earthlv 
sacrifice and earthly homage — or pictured simplv 
as thundering in the sky, or walking on the seem- 
ing vault above, or inhabiting temples built by 
human hands, or " snuffing," as the gross infidel 
says, the savor of the burning victim. Solomon's 
sublime prayer, before referred to, would be suf- 
ficient for the refutation of this, aside from all the 
other passages cited from the Prophets and the 
Pentateuch. Let it be remembered, too, how 
much that prayer reveals of the spiritual culture 
of the Jewish nation; Barbarians, as some would 
style them in comparison with the Greeks. In 
the simplicity of an adoring spirit, Solomon seems 
to feel that every heart in that great assembly 
throbbed in unison with his devout utterance : 
"Will the Most High dwell with men? Will 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 237 

God indeed dwell upon the earth. Behold the 
heaven, yea the heaven of heavens, cannot con- 
tain Thee ; how much less this house that I have 
builded," "for the name of the Lord God of 
Israel." Talk of the Greeks ! Fancy such lan- 
guage used at the dedication of a heathen temple ; 
fancy an Athenian, a Corinthian, or a Boeotian 
audience listening to such a strain ; fancy the 
wonder that we should feel at finding a supplica- 
tion like it in Pindar or Sophocles. How would 
the page be marked, had there been found in the 
writings of the noblest of the Greek theosophists, 
or the most celebrated of their lawgivers, thoughts 
so elevated, so unearthly, as are uttered by Moses, 
the man, as some say, who derived his best ideas 
from the dark animal- worshipping, or, at the 
utmost, symbol-adoring Egyptians : " Take heed 
lest ye forget the covenant of Jehovah your God, 
and make for Him the likeness of any similitude," 
as before quoted ; " take heed lest ye lift up your 
eyes unto the heavens, and when ye see the sun, 
and the moon, and the stars, ye be tempted to 
worship them." Think what was all around this 
peculiar people, with their most peculiar litera- 
ture. Think of this strange monotheistic cleft 
lying between a misty pantheism, rilled with all 
monstrous shadows on the East, and the foul 
polytheism that everywhere spread beyond them 



238 VEDDER LECTURES. 

in the West. What was the restraining power 
which so " dwelt in the tents of Shem, this She- 
kinah presence that abode so constantly in the 
ark of Israel." A due consideration of the spiritual 
wonder here, casfe into the background the im- 
portant, though still subordinate, question of 
physical miracles. 

Strauss would regard the ideas of the infinite 
and the absolute as inconsistent with the personal 
character. But how do he and Spencer know 
what is inconsistent with the unknowable? Even 
pantheism may be so held as to admit the idea of 
personality. In fact, the only pantheism we need 
fear is that which strips God of His moral attri- 
butes by sinking Him into nature* I may believe 
in God as the to nav, and yet regard this Great 
Whole as a person who knows me a personal 
part, and thinks of me, and numbers every hair 
of my head. For personality is the most defin- 
able of ideas. It denotes a being, whether all or 
part, whether infinite or only very great, of 
whom I can use the personal pronouns, saying 
" He is," or " He is good," or " He is the 
rewarder of those who seek Him." Or it means 
one to whom I — even as a part — can say THOU 
— imploring Him in the language of the dying 
philosopher : O thou Great all, Summa rerum, 
Summa Omnium, Causa Causarum, MISERERE MEL 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



239 



I can believe thus in God as the TO II AN, and 
yet, if I am a Christian, can say, Elohai, MY GOD, 
— even as the Apostle warrants us, when he says : 
"All things are yours ; for ye are Christ's, and 
Christ is God's." It was the Hebrew Paul that 
gave these philosophical Greeks a lesson in 
absolutism, when standing upon Mars hill he said : 
Ev dvrti yap ZflMEN, real ravovfieda, aai E^MEN; 
" For in Him we live and MOVE, and have our 
BEING" — not yLvojieda, but E2MEN : in Him we 
live and move and are. 

The infinite can have its finite aspect. The 
infinite may enter into and act in the finite ; may 
assume the finite. The denial of this is, in fact, 
the denial of the infinite. It is virtually saying that 
God cannot do all things ; that because we can- 
not ascend to Him, therefore He cannot come 
down to us. It is the idea which makes intelligi- 
ble, and renders so precious all the anthropopath- 
isms of the Bible, as they are called. It is the 
ground of the doctrine of the incarnation. All 
revelation, whether in written language or 
through nature,, is necessarily anthropopathic. 
Those who talk of holding communication with 
God through His works use anthropopathic lan- 
guage. The Bible only goes beyond in making 
it mutual. God " comes down to see what the 
children of men are doing." The youngest Sab- 



240 VEDDER LECTURES. 

bath scholar is not deceived by the language ; 
whilst the highest minds may thank Him for such 
a condescension to our poor thinking, our sense- 
bound conceptions, our yearning for communion 
in some way, between the infinite and the finite 
mind. We may bless God for such a mode of 
speech ; but we should not forget how sublimely 
these same Scriptures set forth also the far 
aspect, the high aspect, the philosophic aspect, 
if any prefer the term, as well as the near pres- 
ence. It is the great peculiarity of the Bible in 
distinction from all other writings, that it so unites 
the two — that with such unshrinking boldness it 
maintains this tremendous equilibrium of the 
near and the far, and sometimes in closest con- 
nection: "Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, 
and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in 
secret that I shall not see him ? Do not I fill 
heaven and earth, saith the Lord ? " But phi- 
losophy cannot keep its balance here. In soaring 
towards the infinite height, as it would esteem it, 
it loses sight of the infinite depth, the infinite low- 
liness ; in stretching itself out towards the in- 
finitely far, it. fails to comprehend the infinitely 
near. The Scriptural writers have no misgiving 
in the use of such a style : " The high and holy 
One "— " the humble and broken spirit to 
whom He comes down." There is no incongru- 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



241 



ity ; both notes belong alike to the mighty sweep 
of this infinite diapason. It represents the fulness 
of the divine, the fulness of Him that filleth all in 
all, — entering into the finiteness, knowing the 
knowledge, thinking the thought, feeling the feel- 
ing, and thus truly using the language of the hu- 
man m its intensest and most human utterance. 
It is no inspiration of earth that dares to employ 
such a style as this. 

There is a mode of intelligence which the Bible 
represents God as challenging to Himself, when 
he says : " My thinking is above your thinking as 
heaven is high above the earth." Timeless, space- 
less, without succession, one great totality of 
cause and effect as they are mutually seen in each 
other ; we try to talk here, but our words fail 
us. They are aiming at something ; they are not 
altogether meaningless ; we are confident that 
there is some reality to which they point, as we are 
sure that there is a real North to which the needle 
directs its tremulous motion in the dark night of 
storms ; but that is as far as we can go. " Such 
knowledge is too high for us ; it is wonderful ; we 
cannot attain unto it." The Scriptures go be- 
yond Hamilton, Mansell, and Spencer, in what it 
affirms respecting the divine unknowableness. 
But still it is the known of God that gives this 
idea of His unknowableness. " His thoughts are 
11 



242 VEDDER LECTURES. 

not as our thoughts." Most true indeed. But 
again the question returns, and we may defy any 
one to show that it is an irrational one : Is the beliet 
in this transcendent thinking and knowing at 
war with that other belief on which all religion is 
grounded, that God may also, if it pleases Him, 
think as we think, and know as we know, and even 
feel as we feel, — entering not only into our finite 
thought, but into our sense- world, — yet remaining 
infinite, as He dwells unchangeably in the time- 
and-space-and-sense-transcending sphere ? This 
is the great Bible idea, " the Logos, or Eternal 
Reason, becoming flesh." Believing it, we have 
no more trouble with the Scriptural anthropo- 
pathisms. To know, to think, comes under this 
term as much to remember, to feel, to love. 
We hail these modes of expression ; we rejoice in 
them as the language of a father with his tran- 
scending intelligence coming down to his finite 
children, and that, too, not as a mere show, or 
make-believe, but as really entering into that 
lower sphere, and there really speaking the child's 
language as the truthful though far-distant re- 
flection of His own eternal thought. All this, it 
may be said, involves the absurdity of the infinite 
becoming finite, or entering into the finite sphere 
without ceasing to be infinite. But how dare we 
thus apply our measurement to One we declare 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 243 

to be unknowable, and boast of the declaration 
as the highest attainment of a knowledge tran- 
scending the vulgar? If we resort to scholastic 
reasoning, it would certainly seem that the denial 
of the possibility of such a becoming would be a 
denial of the infinity itself, a limitation of the very 
idea expressed by the term. Another question 
is raised in respect to these anthropopathisms : 
Why could there not have been used a more 
philosophical style, though still human, or one 
more adapted to cultivated minds? The answer 
is, that whilst nothing would have been gained in 
point of significance, or any nearer approach to 
the ineffable idea, much would have been lost in 
power and vividness. All philosophic and scien- 
tific terms have sense images at their roots. It 
is impossible for human language to get out of 
this. It is ever metaphorical in the conveyance 
of ideas transcending sense. By the fading away 
of the metaphorical hue, words become dead ab- 
stractions, algebraic symbols, as it were, deficient 
in vividness of meaning, yet compromising the 
truth sometimes by cheating the soul into the 
notion that there is more in them than they really 
contain. When thus dead and dried, they are 
laid away in the fossil cabinets of philosophic, or 
scientific, or learned speech. They are the lan- 
guage of "culture," as Mathew Arnold would 



244 VEDDER LECTURES. 

say. In this state they become a dead weight 
upon our thinking-, whilst the simpler or earlier 
language, never losing its unchangeable freshness, 
leaves the soul at liberty to follow the illimitable 
idea, whether in the direction of the infinitely 
high, the infinitely far, or the infinitely near. 

This same awful equilibrium, as we have called 
it, is preserved ever in the representation of the 
divine moral attributes. It is another peculiarity 
of our Holy Scripture in which no other resem- 
bles it. The terribly severe, the meltingly mer- 
ciful ; the inexorable judicial righteousness, the 
loving fatherhood ; we find them both expressed, 
— and in the same passage, sometimes, — without 
the least shrinking from the near conjunction of 
things, to our thinking, so seemingly antagonistic. 
The same view may be taken of the unshrinking 
representation the Bible makes of God in His 
universality, as Lord of all worlds, u Lord of 
Hosts," of all transcending ranks of being, as 
E n tob2 "Tbfa> " King of eternities," and at the same 
time, and sometimes in near connection, as a 
local deity, a patrial deity, a Oeog narpoiog, J^ 
i^tl^j el Israel, God of Israel,God of His people, 
— the I AM that I AM, the f O.N, and in the next 
verse almost (Exod. iii. 13) "the God of the 
Fathers, God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob," 
that much-used Old Testament formula in which 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 245 

our Saviour, in His argument with the blinded 
Sadducees, the broad churchmen, or wide-think- 
ing people of His day, found so much of " the 
power of an endless life." It is that same presen- 
tation of the infinitely far and the infinitely near 
on which I have been insisting, and which is so 
striking a feature of the Bible as distinguished 
from all other books. 

By such writers as Strauss this near patrial 
language, so precious to the believer, is cited to 
prove tnat the Bible represents Jehovah as rank- 
ing with the gods of the surrounding nations, 
like Zeus, or Thor, or Dagon, or Bel, or Chem- 
osh. In such a charge there is wholly over- 
looked, or purposely ignored, these declarations 
of absoluteness and universality, sometimes in 
the same chapter, and so transcending the loftiest 
language of any philosophic or scientific theism. 
God is, indeed, set forth as a 6eog narpmog, a 
patrial deity, the God of His people, of those 
who are near to Him by faith. Not unfrequently 
does this language become still closer, more 
familiar, more personal. He declares Himself a 
tribal and family divinity. " His mercy is unto 
children's children of those that fear Him." He 
is, moreover, the God of the individual, of every 
one who believeth. He permits the worshipper 
to address Him by those near personal pronouns 



246 VEDDER LECTURES. 

that so astonish us by their boldness in the 
prayers of the Old Testament saints : " O God, 
my God ; early will I seek Thee." " Why art 
thou cast down, O my soul ; for still do I make 
confession unto Him, the salvation of my coun- 
tenance " — my salvation ever before me — "and 
my God." 

What the age demands is a more intense study 
of the Holy Scriptures, accompanied by the 
earnest prayer : " Open Thou mine eyes, that I 
may behold wondrous things out of Thy law." 
The Bible itself must be brought out, and its 
mighty spiritual power unfolded, as the best 
answer to infidelity — the Bible subjectively, the 
Bible objectively, as the great standing miracle 
of human history, — as presenting a train of events 
most unaccountable in their bearing on the 
world's course, as containing ideas which no 
philosophy, no theory of development, can ever 
explain. To such study it will reveal itself as 
" the power of God." Other defences are, indeed, 
important, but without this they are shorn of the 
great strength which alone can make them avail- 
able to the pulling down of " strongholds," and 
the overthrow of the truth's unwearying foes. 



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